Re: Bug#1059870: aboot: Please help testing dropping a.out.h support
On Tue, 2 Jan 2024 at 21:00, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
<glaubitz@physik.fu-berlin.de> wrote:
>
> On Tue, 2024-01-02 at 18:07 +0000, Dimitri John Ledkov wrote:
> > For cross building, as far as I can tell one needs to build the tool
> > twice - once for the BUILD architecture and once for HOST
> > architecture, use one during the build and package the other one into
> > the deb.
>
> That's correct and I am currently pondering over a clever way to do that.
>
> > > I will most likely just copy the relevant definitions out of aout.h, both
> > > the generic and the alpha-specific stuff in order to both be able to drop
> > > reliance on aout.h in the kernel as well as make the package fully cross-
> > > buildable.
> >
> > But why? as far as I can tell, the a.out code path is never executed
> > as it seems like Debian has been using ELF based vmlinuz since like
> > before 2009. Are you sure that the a.out codepath of objstrip.c is
> > needed or executed at all?
> >
> > Or am I missing something, and like objstrip.c portions are executed
> > against some other a.out formatted things which are not Linux kernel?
> >
> > Should I provide a patch that adds printfs during a.out codepath
> > block, to see if it actually is ever executed?
>
> I think it's still reasonable to keep a.out support in the tool because
> users might use it for a.out binaries generated from other tools.
Which tools? given that support has been dropped to execute any
binaries like that everywhere. This still sounds very hypothetical,
given that code path is specifically for vmlinux kernel only.
> Besides,
> it's just a matter of copying a few header definitions, so not really a
> blocker unless I am missing something.
>
> > >
> > > I would also prefer to get all relevant changes upstreamed.
> > >
> >
> > Upstream has policy of not carrying dead code, which in this case its
> > what it is for kernels built in like last decade.
>
> I was talking about aboot upstream which is maintained by Matt Turner from
> Gentoo these days [1].
Ok, and I'm talking about linux kernel copy of aboot at
https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/tree/arch/alpha/boot
Can you please test the debdiff I have attached, such that I can
confirm with linux kernel upstream that I can drop a.out.h support
there?
I do not have access to alpha, and currently this is the remaining
piece holding up a.out.h in linux kernel upstream on x86 alpha m86k
mips. Which would be nice to drop.
>
> Adrian
>
> > [1] https://github.com/mattst88/aboot/
>
> --
> .''`. John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
> : :' : Debian Developer
> `. `' Physicist
> `- GPG: 62FF 8A75 84E0 2956 9546 0006 7426 3B37 F5B5 F913
--
Dimitri
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