Re: A symbol version patch for glibc 2.x compatibility

["H . J . Lu" <hjl at valinux dot com>]

On Mon, Nov 13, 2000 at 10:30:45AM -0800, Ian Lance Taylor wrote:
>    Date: Sun, 12 Nov 2000 11:52:08 -0800
>    From: "H . J . Lu" <hjl@valinux.com>
> 
>    I guess people may get confused by what EI_OSABI is used for. It is
>    used to tell the ELF tools that if you see the none 0 EI_OSABI field
>    and you don't know what that operating system and ABI do, don't bother.
>    It is certainly not the case for Linux.
> 
> To belabor my point: is this written down anywhere, or do we have to
> ask you and Ulrich for clarification whenever we deal with the new
> changes to the ELF standard?
> 

I don't think it was written down anywhere. But I believe it has
come up during discussion. It goes like this, if you see something
you don't know, don't touch it. One goal for an ABI is ELF tools
from different vendors can work on the same set of ELF files. But
an OS vendor is free to add its own extensions. When you do it in
the ABI incompatible way such that the other ABI compliant ELF tools
may misprocess it, you should set the EI_OSABI bits.


-- 
H.J. Lu (hjl@valinux.com)