• Linus Torvalds's avatar
    a.out: remove core dumping support · 08300f44
    Linus Torvalds authored
    We're (finally) phasing out a.out support for good.  As Borislav Petkov
    points out, we've supported ELF binaries for about 25 years by now, and
    coredumping in particular has bitrotted over the years.
    
    None of the tool chains even support generating a.out binaries any more,
    and the plan is to deprecate a.out support entirely for the kernel.  But
    I want to start with just removing the core dumping code, because I can
    still imagine that somebody actually might want to support a.out as a
    simpler biinary format.
    
    Particularly if you generate some random binaries on the fly, ELF is a
    much more complicated format (admittedly ELF also does have a lot of
    toolchain support, mitigating that complexity a lot and you really
    should have moved over in the last 25 years).
    
    So it's at least somewhat possible that somebody out there has some
    workflow that still involves generating and running a.out executables.
    
    In contrast, it's very unlikely that anybody depends on debugging any
    legacy a.out core files.  But regardless, I want this phase-out to be
    done in two steps, so that we can resurrect a.out support (if needed)
    without having to resurrect the core file dumping that is almost
    certainly not needed.
    
    Jann Horn pointed to the <asm/a.out-core.h> file that my first trivial
    cut at this had missed.
    
    And Alan Cox points out that the a.out binary loader _could_ be done in
    user space if somebody wants to, but we might keep just the loader in
    the kernel if somebody really wants it, since the loader isn't that big
    and has no really odd special cases like the core dumping does.
    Acked-by: default avatarBorislav Petkov <bp@alien8.de>
    Cc: Alan Cox <gnomes@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk>
    Cc: Jann Horn <jannh@google.com>
    Cc: Richard Weinberger <richard@nod.at>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarLinus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
    08300f44
binfmt_aout.c 8.27 KB