maintainers.
After we established our branding method of writing upto 8 characters of
the OS name into the ELF header in the padding; the Binutils maintainers
and/or SCO (as USL) decided that instead the ELF header should grow two new
fields -- EI_OSABI and EI_ABIVERSION. Each of these are an 8-bit unsigned
integer. SCO has assigned official values for the EI_OSABI field. In
addition to this, the Binutils maintainers and NetBSD decided that a better
ELF branding method was to include ABI information in a ".note" ELF
section.
With this set of changes, we will now create ELF binaries branded using
both "official" methods. Due to the complexity of adding a section to a
binary, binaries branded with ``brandelf'' will only brand using the
EI_OSABI method. Also due to the complexity of pulling a section out of an
ELF file vs. poking around in the ELF header, our image activator only
looks at the EI_OSABI header field.
Note that a new kernel can still properly load old binaries except for
Linux static binaries branded in our old method.
*
* For a short period of time, ``ld'' will also brand ELF binaries
* using our old method. This is so people can still use kernel.old
* with a new world. This support will be removed before 5.0-RELEASE,
* and may not last anywhere upto the actual release. My expiration
* time for this is about 6mo.
*
David E. O'Brien
John Polstra