[illumos-Developer] ON is bloated and a bunch of stuff that doesn't need to be there should be ripped out (was Re: Heads up: perl 5.8.4 removal)

[Aram Hăvărneanu]

On Mon, Nov 15, 2010 at 3:59 PM, Joerg Schilling
<Joerg.Schilling at fokus.fraunhofer.de> wrote:
>
> It seems that we still have users for this interface. This tells us that
> there is a need after 16 years.
>

Actually it seems we don't have users for this interface. We have
identified a single such user so far. There are certainly more users
that want us to support PE_COFF in the kernel. I know for sure there
there are at least 2 such users so it seems PE_COFF is at least twice
as important as a.out, yet there are no flaming threads regarding
PE_COFF :-).

> The interface cannot be emulated, it must
> be inside the kernel.

*Everything* can be emulated, always, and in this case it's actually
very easy to have an userspace ELF a.out loader. An ELF binary that
parses a.out, loads it in it's address space, forks and jumps to the
code.

> Checking this list against e.g. mkisofs and Apple HFS support would result in
> points 1) and 3) to give strongs arguments for removing support.

We don't support Apple HFS. Also, mkisofs not in use?!?

-- 
Aram Hăvărneanu