dumping core on *(NULL) is not a function of your processor

[Paul Vixie]

In article <62285 at sun.uucp> guy at gorodish.Sun.COM (Guy Harris) writes:
# John Bruner, when he added "-Z" to "ld", added a new magic number for it, I
# think; it's like ZMAGIC only it leaves page 0 out of the address space.  I
# don't see any horrible problem with adding a new magic number.

It's a hack, though.

What's needed is a single magic number that says "I'm a binary executable
for architecture Fegan-Elmer Blueblood 20000", and then something much
smarter and more elegant than COFF that says "my segments are XXXXXX, the
first segment has this kind of memory map (with this region demand- paged
(if possible), this region pre-loaded during exec, this region shared and
read-only, this region shared and read-write (!), this one on the roof, this
one in the garden, etc, etc".  A generic solution instead of a
multiplication of magic numbers.  COFF won't do as-is, but it's a step
in the right direction.

The hack will be easier, and can be put in in probably about two hours.  But
I don't want a hack that runs on my own system, I want something that Sun and
DEC and CSRG and Pyramid and MIPS and AT&T will all say "yeah, that's a good
solution" and _all_ use it.  I don't want another BSD-only hack or another
AT&T-only hack.
-- 
Paul Vixie
Digital Equipment Corporation	Work:  vixie at dec.com	Play:  paul at vixie.UUCP
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