From owner-freebsd-questions Sat May 31 13:21:54 1997 Return-Path: Received: (from root@localhost) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.5/8.8.5) id NAA10685 for questions-outgoing; Sat, 31 May 1997 13:21:54 -0700 (PDT) Received: from obie.softweyr.ml.org ([199.104.124.49]) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id NAA10680 for ; Sat, 31 May 1997 13:21:50 -0700 (PDT) Received: (from wes@localhost) by obie.softweyr.ml.org (8.7.5/8.6.12) id NAA18541; Sat, 31 May 1997 13:36:08 -0600 (MDT) Date: Sat, 31 May 1997 13:36:08 -0600 (MDT) Message-Id: <199705311936.NAA18541@obie.softweyr.ml.org> From: Wes Peters To: Paul CC: questions@freebsd.org Subject: Binaries In-Reply-To: References: Sender: owner-questions@freebsd.org X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk pauld@mail.dotcom.fr writes: > Which binary format does FreeBSD use? (I looked into a file but it wasn't > ELF like linux uses and I don't know if it's still a.out but that wouldn't > be that great I think (adress space, that's why linux uses ELF)) FreeBSD uses a.out because there aren't any good reasons to change. I'm not sure why Linux ended up with so many problems in their a.out format, and won't speculate to avoid starting a flame war. ;^) ELF does not grant any larger address space than a.out, the address space is pretty much dictated by the adressing model of the MMU. As far as I know, both Linux and FreeBSD use the i386 32-bit flat memory model, which yeilds a virtual address space of 2^32 bytes. FreeBSD does support Linux ELF binaries if you load the Linux emulator. -- "Where am I, and what am I doing in this handbasket?" Wes Peters Softweyr LLC http://www.xmission.com/~softweyr softweyr@xmission.com