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    SubjectRe: [PATCH] x86: Deprecate a.out support
    Date
    Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> writes:

    > On Mon, Mar 11, 2019 at 9:26 AM Måns Rullgård <mans@mansr.com> wrote:
    >>
    >> 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).

    The latest version I have is 5.1, and that uses ECOFF.

    > 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).

    I don't have any specific examples, but I can well imagine people
    keeping an Alpha machine for no other reason than the ability to run
    some (old) application only available (to them) for OSF/1. Running them
    on Linux rather than Tru64 brings the advantage of being a modern system
    in other regards.

    For anything open source, there's little reason to keep the Alpha at
    all.

    --
    Måns Rullgård

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