On 01/04/2011 11:46 PM, Jan Beulich wrote: >>> >>> Oh god, please, no. >>> >>> I have to say I'm highly questioning to Jan's statement in the first >>> place. Crossing 32- and 64-bit ELF like that sounds like a kernel >>> security hole waiting to happen. > > A particular OS/kernel has the freedom to not implement support for > other than the default format. But having the ABI disallow it > altogether certainly isn't the right choice. And yes, we had been > allowing cross-bitness ELF in an experimental (long canceled) OS > of ours. > >> Yeah, and there are other targets where the elf class determines ABI >> too (e.g. EM_S390 is used for both 31-bit and 64-bit binaries and >> the ELF class determines which). > > So the usual thing is going to happen - someone made a mistake (I'm > convinced the ELF class was never meant to affect anything but the > file format), and this gets taken as an excuse to let the mistake > spread. >
I don't think it's all that unreasonable to say the ELF class affects the ABI. After all, there are lots of things about the ABI that is related to the ELF class -- the format of the GOT and PLT, for one thing. -hpa