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Comment by amarant | Hacker News Reader

Wait are you saying Linux broke user-space? I've completely missed this and would like to know more, may I be so bold as to request a link?

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> > But here we are with linux abandoning things like 'a.out'.

> I've completely missed this and would like to know more, may I be so bold as to request a link?

"A way out for a.out" https://lwn.net/Articles/888741/

"Linux 6.1 Finishes Gutting Out The Old a.out Code" https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-6.1-Gutting-Out-a.out (with links to two earlier articles)

Thanks!

Linux does occasionally remove stuff that seem to have no users and there is no good reason to have a.out binaries since... the late '90s ?

I was playing with some asm code and generating a.out with nasm, got stuck on why it wouldn't load..turns out linux stopped supporting it. When they say "no one uses it" they mean packages and stuff, they don't care about private code you have lying around and other use cases. With a widely deployed platform like windows, they can't assume things like that. There are certainly very valid business application that go back decades. There are literally systems that have 20+ years up time out there.

FWIW, you should be able to hack up an a.out loader pretty easily with binfmt_misc.

A link above mentions a tool for running a.out on a modern kennel:

https://lwn.net/ml/linux-kernel/202203161523.857B469@keescoo...

https://github.com/kees/kernel-tools/tree/trunk/a.out

If someone complained to them that they still need a.out they might've reconsidered. At least that's what's happened before with old architectures.

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