Re: [RFC] Remove all a.out support and gc no-longer-supported OS ABIs? (Re: [PATCH] Avoid spaces in osabi names)

John Baldwin
2016-04-19T19:26:24Z

On Wednesday, March 09, 2016 01:34:30 AM Pedro Alves wrote:
> Yeah. We have some left over bits that reference it, but I think
> we can get rid of them.
>
> I think we can get rid of everything a.out too. We removed most
> support for a.out BSD targets a while ago, but AFAICS, some of the
> a.out support is still in place for debugging BSD core dumps in
> a.out format. I found some left over SunOS a.out support too, which
> we no longer support either.
>
> It is my understanding that OpenBSD switched to ELF core dumps
> several years ago. NetBSD's core man page talks about ELF-format
> core dumps too.
>
> Mark, do you know whether there's any reason we should keep a.out
> support longer?

With my FreeBSD hat on, I think it would be fine to drop a.out support.
FreeBSD still permits running a.out binaries, but if someone really wants
to debug that they can probably grab an older snapshot of gdb if they
really care. (FreeBSD has used ELF for binaries and cores since 3.0
which was released in October 1998. The last release to ship a.out
binaries was 2.2.8 released in November of 1998.)

--
John Baldwin