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Date:   Sun, 13 Mar 2022 12:56:44 +0100
From:   Borislav Petkov <bp@alien8.de>
To:     James Jones <linux@theinnocuous.com>
Cc:     keescook@chromium.org, x86@kernel.org, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
Subject: Re: [PATCH] x86: Remove a.out support
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On Sat, Mar 12, 2022 at 06:06:26PM +0000, James Jones wrote:
> > Sorry for taking so long to complain, but I have been meaning to note
> > that I and a few others are still using a.out. I saw it go by in my
> > morning Google news skim that this went in, and figured it was now or
> > never. The use case is running an old set of tools to build programs for
> > the Atari Jaguar. Namely, Atari's assembler (mac) and linker (aln). The
> > alternative is running windows versions in dosbox, or using some
> > replacements that have been developed based on an even older,
> > less-featureful version of the source code for mac and aln, but which
> > still haven't managed to add back in all the features needed to build
> > some programs or use the Atari debugging tools (Also available in a.out
> > only).

Ok, for my own understanding only: you want to build those tools as
a.out binaries and run them on x86, correct?

Because wikipedia says that jaguar thing has a motorola m68k system
processor and looking at your makefile, you build some ancient gcc with
--target=m68k-aout so where does x86's a.out support come into play
here?

> > If others are open to it, I can share my small local patches along with
> > a revert of this change. I'd also like to ask whether much is gained by
> > deleting this code as far as reducing maintenance burden. It has
> > survived nearly untouched since the deprecation notice and still works
> > modulo a broken preprocessor macro in fs/exec.c.

I personally don't mind if you fix it up and take care of it going
forward, shouldn't be too much of a maintenance overhead - I'd just like
you to document somewhere in those files what is still using this so
that when you don't care for that project anymore or you stop needing
it for whatever reason, we can look up the URL and check whether we can
remove a.out support then.

Thx.

-- 
Regards/Gruss,
    Boris.

https://people.kernel.org/tglx/notes-about-netiquette