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.
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