Linux Plans To Stop Building a.out Support On Alpha & M68k To See If Anyone Cares

[jabl]

One wonders whether anyone cares about Alpha anymore? At some point I believe the kernel developers had some interest in it has it had the loosest craziest memory consistency model imaginable, so they used it as a sort of lowest common denominator when designing their own memory barrier etc. abstractions. But if nobody actually runs anything on Alpha anymore, why bother?

[Chewi]

What do you actually run it on?

A slightly beefed-up Amiga 1200, but I don't build on there. I used to do a lot of cross-compiling, but I've already made heavy use of QEMU lately.

[LinuxID10T]

As the maintainer of Gentoo on m68k, I really don't care!

What do you actually run it on?

[Chewi]

As the maintainer of Gentoo on m68k, I really don't care!

[soulsource]

Ah, the good old scream test.

[tildearrow]

I like these honest headlines.

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Linux Plans To Stop Building a.out Support On Alpha & M68k To See If Anyone Cares

Back in 2019 that seems like an eternity ago with all that's gone on in the world, the Linux kernel deprecated a.out support. This executable / object code / shared library file format was used prior to the dominance of ELF but is seldom if ever used today. There have been pending patches to finally remove a.out from the kernel while the plan now is to stop building it on Alpha and Motorola 68000 targets to see if anyone notices/cares...

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Linux-a.out-M68k-Alpha