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Comment by fmakunbound | Hacker News Reader

Around that time, I vaguely recall Linux switching from DWARF to ELF, some kind of libc5 (libc4 ??) to libc6 migration in the the ecosystem and a Sanyo CDROM driver that needed some source code edits to work for my model causing me endless grief as a kid exploring beyond DOS. Great times!

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I was running either a Slackware or SLS distro when I did the a.out to ELF transition. I remember the libc migration occurring but I don't recall the details. It amazes me that I pulled it off given how little I understood about how the system actually worked. My experience, up to that point, was with MS-DOS and being a user on a Xenix system (but not a sysadmin). I was really, really excited to have a Unix-like OS at home, but definitely didn't understand how shared libraries worked, etc.

Slackware was a bit late transitioning from libc5 to GNU libc. I dropped a copy of GNU libc from Red Hat onto my Slackware box, and binaries that expected GNU libc pretty much just worked.

I remember doing that, as well. I had Slackware running with some custom patches. I had to upgrade the kernel, libc, ld.so, and a bunch of other stuff. For a while, I had a system that ran both a.out and ELF binaries. This was back in 1996 or so?

I think '96. I remember a friend, who I only ever met face-to-face at Defcon 4, telling me that he didn't think I could pull off the migration and that I should just reload the system. That pins it at '96.

It was a.out to ELF, there was separate stabs to DWARF migration afaik related to how debugging info was stored.

For me, the biggest migration pain was being a heavy KDE user in the middle of GCC 2.95 -> GCC 3.0 migration, with my Debian unstable (in between woody and sarge, iirc) getting into state where half of the C++ code was compiled with 2.95, and half with 3.0...

I remember occasionally contributing to libc at that time. libc4 was a.out, at least that was the name I remember. libc5 was the first ELF libc and libc6 is glibc.

Slackware 2.0 major milestone was having ELF instead of classical a.out.

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