“B) It was a binary interpreter for ELF, COFF and a.out.”
This was one of the awesome things about X. Back in the day, the ATI driver (mach, the thing before rage before radeon) was developed externally. Building (as in compiling) an X driver was not an easy task, but due to X’s driver design, you could drop in a precompiled gatos (as it was called) driver and it would work. On any OS. Even on an OpenBSD a.out system though the driver was compiled on a Linux ELF system.
I can agree the utility for such is diminished today considering how dependent X drivers are on kernel support, but tossing it in under the “The X Server is huge and stupid.” heading is wrong and stupid. It was a useful feature and people like myself relied on it.
Also, given the number of security bugs in xlock’s history, I’m not sure I want it talking to my media player.
Nobody hates crufty code more than I do, but I would not categorize this as an article that “lays out all the facts.” This is a carefully curated list of some of the facts. Beware developers who promise “it doesn’t work yet, but it’s easy to fix.”
“B) It was a binary interpreter for ELF, COFF and a.out.”
This was one of the awesome things about X. Back in the day, the ATI driver (mach, the thing before rage before radeon) was developed externally. Building (as in compiling) an X driver was not an easy task, but due to X’s driver design, you could drop in a precompiled gatos (as it was called) driver and it would work. On any OS. Even on an OpenBSD a.out system though the driver was compiled on a Linux ELF system.
I can agree the utility for such is diminished today considering how dependent X drivers are on kernel support, but tossing it in under the “The X Server is huge and stupid.” heading is wrong and stupid. It was a useful feature and people like myself relied on it.
Also, given the number of security bugs in xlock’s history, I’m not sure I want it talking to my media player.
Nobody hates crufty code more than I do, but I would not categorize this as an article that “lays out all the facts.” This is a carefully curated list of some of the facts. Beware developers who promise “it doesn’t work yet, but it’s easy to fix.”
I’m tempted to remove the
unixtag since Wayland will definitely be Linux-only as so many of these things seem to be these days.If it’s Linux-only, I’d argue it isn’t
unix.