Date: Mon, 18 Dec 2000 02:58:16 +1000 From: Stephen McKay <mckay@thehub.com.au> To: "Donald J . Maddox" <dmaddox@sc.rr.com> Cc: current@freebsd.org, mckay@thehub.com.au Subject: Re: Is compatibility for old aout binaries broken? Message-ID: <200012171658.eBHGwGW24109@dungeon.home> In-Reply-To: <20001216161756.A6370@cae88-102-101.sc.rr.com> from "Donald J . Maddox" at "Sat, 16 Dec 2000 21:17:57 %2B0000" References: <20001216161756.A6370@cae88-102-101.sc.rr.com>
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On Saturday, 16th December 2000, "Donald J . Maddox" wrote: >The other day, on a whim, I decided to try running an old binary >of SimCity (the same one found in the 'commerce' directory on >many FBSD cds), and it failed in a odd way... You and I may be the only people in the world that run old binaries. This has been broken for new users for some time. :-( Those of us upgrading from source have been immune to this problem, because we retain the old a.out ld.so binary. >/usr/libexec/ld.so: Undefined symbol "___error" called from sim:/usr/X11R6/lib >/aout/libX11.so.6.1 at 0x20160644 When errno became a function that returns a pointer (previously it was a simple integer variable), recompiled libraries became incompatable with old binaries. So, I hacked the a.out loader (ld.so). The fix was in 3.0. Well, Nate called it a horrible hack, so maybe I should say "the hack was in 3.0". >Am I overlooking something obvious here, or is something actually >broken with respect to running old aout binaries? I found that rtld-aout won't compile. That's kinda broken. (It's probably something simple. Looks like the a.out version of a pic library just isn't around any more). I'll try harder later. What's certain is that it isn't compiled by default. I poked about with my old FreeBSD CD collection and found that version 3.0 through 3.2 have a fully functioning (fully hack enabled) ld.so, but an older binary has been substituted in 3.3 and onward, including 4.0 and 4.1, and most likely 4.2 also. I can only guess that some anonymous release engineer (nobody we know :-) picked the wrong CD at some point to get the master copy of ld.so once it stopped compiling. (Or at least stopped being easily compiled.) Ideally, rtld-aout would be compiled fresh for every release. Until then, you can repair your system by retrieving ld.so from a 3.3 CD (in the compat22 section), or from a 3.2 live filesystem CD. Stephen. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message
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