Re: a.out coredumping: fix or delete?

Matthew Wilcox
2019-03-05T12:22:31Z

On Tue, Mar 05, 2019 at 10:19:04AM +0100, Borislav Petkov wrote:
> On Sat, Mar 02, 2019 at 12:57:30AM +0100, Jann Horn wrote:
> > In theory, Linux can dump cores for a.out binaries. In practice, that
> > code is pretty bitrotten and buggy. Does anyone want that code so much
> > that they'd like to fix it, or can we just delete it?
>
> I was asking myself the same question while doing
>
> 10970e1b4be9 ("x86/a.out: Clear the dump structure initially")
>
> especially since it is kinda hard to get the toolchain to even create an
> a.out executable - your script to create one case-in-point.

It's been 25 years since Linux added support for ELF. Can we just
delete the a.out support entirely now? According to the Linux-ELF HOWTO,
support was added in 1.1.52 (August 1994). It's pretty much necromancy
at this point.