On Wed, Feb 17, 2010 at 02:31:09PM +0100, Enrico Weigelt wrote:
> 
> Hi folks,
> 
> just curious: which binfmt does Plan9 use ?
> How are share libraries handled (if they exist at all) ?
> 
> Inspired by recent discussions @ gentoo-user, I'm thinking a bit
> how an simple and efficient binfmt could look like. Some key
> ideas are:
> 
> * purely runtime information (no debug stuff, etc)
> * everthing's sharable/relocatable module, with strict dependencies
> * on exec() the process image will be constructed the modules along
>   the dependency tree (the main program as root)
> * each module may have an entry point (main module w/o is allowed,
>   even if it wouldn't make much sense ;-o), these are called after
>   relocation, along the dependency tree, from leaf to root.
> * the whole loader sits in the kernel (maybe w/ some additional
>   helper deamon in userland), but userland can pass parameters
>   like search pathes, etc via env.
> 
> IMHO having the dynamic loader in kernel-land (in contrary to ELF 
> on GNU) not just removes the need for lots of syscalls, but allows
> a lot of optimizations, eg. code sharing w/ mmap() or caching
> relocation data.
> 
> 
Where was this thread at? I'm subscribed to gentoo-user, but I don't have
any threads about binary formats in my inbox. Was the discussion in
another thread (maybe the giant HAL thread)?

-- 
I am a man who does not exist for others.