Re: a.out vs. ELF

On Mon, Sep 25, 2017 at 09:44:02PM +1000, Miro Kropá?ek wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I'd like to ask maybe trivial question but I couldn't find much
> information about it. Does NetBSD/m68k still support a.out? I could
> find some traces in
> https://www.netbsd.org/docs/elf.html#elf-updating-from-a.out and
> http://netbsd.gw.com/cgi-bin/man-cgi?elf2aout+1+NetBSD-7.1 indicating
> that a.out is obsolete/replaced/not favoured anymore but if the drop
> of a.out happened, when it was?
> 
> I ask mainly because I see its support dropped in gcc and gdb (not in
> other parts of binutils, though), i.e. whether a.out is gone for good
> (it used to be the last working a.out target).

No support to create a.out binaries or libraries directly (why would
you want that anyway?), but you can use objcopy to convert elf -> a.out
(we do that for some machines where the firmware can only boot a.out
kernels).

Martin