Support the Sortix operating system

[Jonas 'Sortie' Termansen]

Thank you for your review Jan :)

On 11/4/24 09:16, Jan Beulich wrote:
> Looks largely okay to me, yet one important question: Can you point us
> at where the ELFOSABI_SORTIX value can be seen to be an officially
> assigned value? Otherwise imo it not being an official value at least
> needs mentioning next to the #define-s.

Oh, nobody ever assigned it officially.

Who is the OSABI allocation authority?

Serious question because it appears the System V ABI documents have been
forked for new platforms and architectures time and time again. I could
only find doubt about who's responsible when I looked around. I had been
kinda assuming it was a de-facto consensus type deal where values
becomes basically official if they're upstreamed to important projects
like binutils.

Sortix has been using the 83 value since 2014. The program loader
requires it to only load compatible executables. The value was picked to
be unlikely to conflict with anyone else (and because it's the ascii
value of 'S'). I just realized today that it's actually inside the
machine reserved range 64-128, although that feature barely looks used
and I don't see how machine extensions could combine with an OS value.

I could go through the OSABI allocation process if I knew how to do it.
I'm happy to add an unofficial comment too, if I knew what official
meant and document it for future platforms. :)

> I'm further somewhat puzzled by TE_Sortix and the comment next to its
> definition: You don't use the symbol anywhere, so why is it important
> to have it defined (distinguishing te-sortix.h from te-generic.h)? I
> would have expected that you also need to alter the respective #if in
> tc-i386.c then.

Oops I did not include that hunk to tc-i386.c. Well spotted.

I attached an updated patch with that hunk included.

You missed that TE_Sortix is used in gas/config/tc-i386.h to set the
ELF_TARGET_FORMAT and ELF_TARGET_FORMAT64 values to targets with the
OSABI constant set. :)

>> (I have begun the FSF copyright assignment process, waiting for them to
>> get back to me, you might prefer to just wait for it go through before
>> merging? I didn't update the ChangeLog because it seems to be barely
>> updated anymore but I'm happy to do it if you could clarify which one
>> and with what contents)
> 
> Perhaps indeed best to wait, unless it turns out taking overly long.

I'm in touch with them :) The process is quite confusing though and
not properly explained anywhere I could find, should hear back soon.

Jonas
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