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>
08300f4402