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From:   Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Date:   Mon, 11 Mar 2019 09:45:32 -0700
Message-ID: <CAHk-=whD1SumZUBQeuMT-GcciwPxg_jW_TsPAmokYp3sGGCGhA@mail.gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [PATCH] x86: Deprecate a.out support
To:     =?UTF-8?B?TcOlbnMgUnVsbGfDpXJk?= <mans@mansr.com>
Cc:     Matt Turner <mattst88@gmail.com>, Borislav Petkov <bp@alien8.de>,
        Alan Cox <gnomes@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk>,
        Matthew Wilcox <willy@infradead.org>,
        Jann Horn <jannh@google.com>,
        Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>,
        Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>,
        kernel list <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>,
        linux-fsdevel <linux-fsdevel@vger.kernel.org>,
        "the arch/x86 maintainers" <x86@kernel.org>,
        Linux API <linux-api@vger.kernel.org>,
        Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>,
        Richard Weinberger <richard@nod.at>,
        Anton Ivanov <anton.ivanov@cambridgegreys.com>,
        linux-alpha <linux-alpha@vger.kernel.org>,
        linux-m68k@lists.linux-m68k.org
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On Mon, Mar 11, 2019 at 9:26 AM M=C3=A5ns Rullg=C3=A5rd <mans@mansr.com> wr=
ote:
>
> Anyone running an Alpha machine likely also has some old OSF/1 binaries
> they may wish to use.  It would be a shame to remove this feature, IMO.

If that's the case then we'd have to keep a.out alive for alpha, since
that's the OSF/1 binary format (at least the only one we support - I'm
not sure if later versions of OSF/1 ended up getting ELF).

Which I guess we could do, but the question is whether people really
do have OSF/1 binaries. It was really useful early on as a source of
known-good binaries to test with, but I'm not convinced it's still in
use.

It's not like there were OSF/1 binaries that we didn't havce access to
natively (well, there _were_ special ones that didn't have open source
versions, but most of them required more system-side support than
Linux ever implemented, afaik).

                           Linus