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Linus Torvalds 08300f4402 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 a.out core files.  But regardless, I want this phase-out to be
done in two steps, so that we can resurrect a.out support (if needed)
without having to resurrect the core file dumping that is almost
certainly not needed.

Jann Horn pointed to the <asm/a.out-core.h> file that my first trivial
cut at this had missed.

And Alan Cox points out that the a.out binary loader _could_ be done in
user space if somebody wants to, but we might keep just the loader in
the kernel if somebody really wants it, since the loader isn't that big
and has no really odd special cases like the core dumping does.

Acked-by: Borislav Petkov <bp@alien8.de>
Cc: Alan Cox <gnomes@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk>
Cc: Jann Horn <jannh@google.com>
Cc: Richard Weinberger <richard@nod.at>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2019-03-05 10:00:35 -08:00
arch a.out: remove core dumping support 2019-03-05 10:00:35 -08:00
block for-linus-20190215 2019-02-15 09:12:28 -08:00
certs kbuild: remove redundant target cleaning on failure 2019-01-06 09:46:51 +09:00
crypto Merge branch 'linus' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/herbert/crypto-2.6 2019-03-05 09:09:55 -08:00
Documentation Merge branch 'linus' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/herbert/crypto-2.6 2019-03-05 09:09:55 -08:00
drivers Merge branch 'linus' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/herbert/crypto-2.6 2019-03-05 09:09:55 -08:00
firmware kbuild: change filechk to surround the given command with { } 2019-01-06 09:46:51 +09:00
fs a.out: remove core dumping support 2019-03-05 10:00:35 -08:00
include Merge branch 'linus' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/herbert/crypto-2.6 2019-03-05 09:09:55 -08:00
init revert "initramfs: cleanup incomplete rootfs" 2019-02-21 09:00:59 -08:00
ipc ipc: IPCMNI limit check for semmni 2018-10-31 08:54:14 -07:00
kernel Merge git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/davem/net-next 2019-03-05 08:26:13 -08:00
lib Merge git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/davem/net 2019-03-04 13:26:15 -08:00
LICENSES This is a fairly typical cycle for documentation. There's some welcome 2018-10-24 18:01:11 +01:00
mm Merge branch 'akpm' (patches from Andrew) 2019-03-01 09:04:59 -08:00
net Merge git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/davem/net 2019-03-04 13:26:15 -08:00
samples Merge git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/davem/net-next 2019-03-05 08:26:13 -08:00
scripts kasan: turn off asan-stack for clang-8 and earlier 2019-03-01 09:02:33 -08:00
security get rid of legacy 'get_ds()' function 2019-03-04 10:50:14 -08:00
sound sound fixes for 5.0 2019-02-20 09:42:52 -08:00
tools selftest/net: Remove duplicate header 2019-03-04 11:35:51 -08:00
usr user/Makefile: Fix typo and capitalization in comment section 2018-12-11 00:18:03 +09:00
virt kvm: properly check debugfs dentry before using it 2019-02-28 08:57:32 -08:00
.clang-format clang-format: Update .clang-format with the latest for_each macro list 2019-01-19 19:26:06 +01:00
.cocciconfig scripts: add Linux .cocciconfig for coccinelle 2016-07-22 12:13:39 +02:00
.get_maintainer.ignore
.gitattributes .gitattributes: set git diff driver for C source code files 2016-10-07 18:46:30 -07:00
.gitignore kbuild: Add support for DT binding schema checks 2018-12-13 09:41:32 -06:00
.mailmap .mailmap: Add Mathieu Othacehe 2019-02-21 11:41:19 +00:00
COPYING COPYING: use the new text with points to the license files 2018-03-23 12:41:45 -06:00
CREDITS CREDITS/MAINTAINERS: Retire parisc-linux.org email domain 2019-02-21 20:16:10 +01:00
Kbuild kbuild: use assignment instead of define ... endef for filechk_* rules 2019-01-06 10:22:35 +09:00
Kconfig kconfig: move the "Executable file formats" menu to fs/Kconfig.binfmt 2018-08-02 08:06:55 +09:00
MAINTAINERS Merge branch 'linus' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/herbert/crypto-2.6 2019-03-05 09:09:55 -08:00
Makefile Linux 5.0 2019-03-03 15:21:29 -08:00
README Drop all 00-INDEX files from Documentation/ 2018-09-09 15:08:58 -06:00

Linux kernel
============

There are several guides for kernel developers and users. These guides can
be rendered in a number of formats, like HTML and PDF. Please read
Documentation/admin-guide/README.rst first.

In order to build the documentation, use ``make htmldocs`` or
``make pdfdocs``.  The formatted documentation can also be read online at:

    https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/

There are various text files in the Documentation/ subdirectory,
several of them using the Restructured Text markup notation.

Please read the Documentation/process/changes.rst file, as it contains the
requirements for building and running the kernel, and information about
the problems which may result by upgrading your kernel.