Re: [osol-discuss] Re: GNU ld -shared fails to link filtered symbols on Solaris

[Ian Lance Taylor <ian at airs dot com>]

Joerg.Schilling@fokus.fraunhofer.de (Joerg Schilling) writes:

Joerg.Schilling@fokus.fraunhofer.de (Joerg Schilling) writes:

> Eric Botcazou <ebotcazou@libertysurf.fr> wrote:
> 
> > > Well, Sun did invent ELF, so an extension to ELF made by Sun seems to be an
> > > official extension that should be supported by all tools.
> >
> > You're rewriting history, ELF was invented by UNIX System Laboratories.
> 
> Can you prove that please?
> 
> The first time I heard about ELF was with a talk held by Bill Joy on a Sun user 
> group meeting in 1987.

ELF was used in SVR4 long before Sun adopted it when they moved from
SunOS to Solaris.  That said, the version of ELF used in SVR4 was
closely based on the shared library implementation Sun used with the
a.out object file format in SunOS 4.

To me it seems that Sun developed the basic ideas, and AT&T Unix
System Laboratories codified it into a complete standard.  A
particular idea which AT&T added which was not in SunOS was the
separation of sections and segments.

Either way, it's really irrelevant to the original point.  Many people
other than Sun use ELF.  The registry of ELF numbers is held at SCO.
There is an ELF ABI group which has meet occasionally with
representatives from many companies.  Sun is free to extend ELF using
the defined extension capability, and that is what they have done.
Extensions written at Sun do not automatically become part of the ELF
standard.

Ian