Re: [RFA] Sparc/Linux fixes part 1

[Richard Earnshaw <rearnsha@arm.com>]

>    From: Andrew Cagney <ac131313@cygnus.com>
>    Date: Fri, 19 Apr 2002 22:46:23 -0400
>    
>    How does this Kernel, for instance, differentate between a GNU/Linux 
>    sparc binary and a Solaris binary when doing emulation?
> 
> I'm going to delete the Solaris binary support any day now as an
> aside.
> 
> The two binaries look identical, the both look like elf32_sparc.
> I don't know how many times I can say this.
> 
> "The binaries look identical, but we screwed up on Sparc/Linux
>  a long time ago and the long double type is 8 bytes instead of
>  the ABI mandated 16 bytes.  We are in no position to change this
>  with the amount of existing binaries out there."
> 
> There is no distinguising characterstic in the elf header nor anywhere
> else.

I'm sticking my nose in here where I probably don't know all the facts, so 
please excuse me if I'm barking up the wrong tree...

glibc does provide a note in the executable, which as I understand it, 
will differ between Linux and Solaris.  Can you not assume that if the 
note is missing entirely that you have a Sun/Solaris system and that if it 
is present you can use it to determine the OS and hence the ABI?

See glibc/abi-tags and glibc/csu/abi-note.S

R.