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Commit 08300f44 authored by Linus Torvalds's avatar Linus Torvalds
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a.out: remove core dumping support

We're (finally) phasing out a.out support for good.  As Borislav Petkov
points out, we've supported ELF binaries for about 25 years by now, and
coredumping in particular has bitrotted over the years.

None of the tool chains even support generating a.out binaries any more,
and the plan is to deprecate a.out support entirely for the kernel.  But
I want to start with just removing the core dumping code, because I can
still imagine that somebody actually might want to support a.out as a
simpler biinary format.

Particularly if you generate some random binaries on the fly, ELF is a
much more complicated format (admittedly ELF also does have a lot of
toolchain support, mitigating that complexity a lot and you really
should have moved over in the last 25 years).

So it's at least somewhat possible that somebody out there has some
workflow that still involves generating and running a.out executables.

In contrast, it's very unlikely that anybody depends on debugging any
legacy ...
parent 63bdf428
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