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The ABI status of ELF hash tables

The ABI status of ELF hash tables

Posted Aug 22, 2022 0:19 UTC (Mon) by maskray (subscriber, #112608)
Parent article: The ABI status of ELF hash tables

> Blaming the EAC developers for not keeping up with Linux ELF hash-table formats might not be entirely fair.

Probably. But DT_HASH has mostly disappeared from Fedora for 16+ years and several other distributions for similarly long years.
libc.so.6 does contain DT_HASH for a long time, but it is just a rare exception.

> The DT_HASH format is mandated by the System V ABI specification, the DT_GNU_HASH format is undocumented, and there has been no deprecation campaign to get users to move on. Chances are those developers are as surprised as anybody and haven't just been ignoring the "switch to DT_GNU_HASH" entry languishing in their issue tracker for the last decade or so. Regardless of blame, though, something needs to be done to solve this problem and save gamers from the prospect of having to get some actual work done.

I think it is fair to say that DT_GNU_HASH is de facto deprecated.
DT_GNU_HASH not in generic ABI is not an issue since In general a processor supplement ABI or an operating system ABI can replace a generic ABI feature, and we should not read too much from the generic ABI wording.

I have more to say on https://maskray.me/blog/2022-08-21-glibc-and-dt-gnu-hash


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The ABI status of ELF hash tables

Posted Aug 23, 2022 15:24 UTC (Tue) by JanC_ (guest, #34940) [Link]

I think you mean DT_HASH (not DT_GNU_HASH) is de facto deprecated.

Keeping it available might be useful for some general purpose distros that want compatibility with very old binaries, but seems useless for e.g. most embedded systems or cloud images.


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