#BETRAYAL AT KRONDOR USED VENDOR CODE#

Yeah looks like in the FreeBSD 3.0 release (October 1998), mentioned in old versions of the FreeBSD handbook: There were already other formats (predominantly forms of COFF) because the limitations of a.out had started to be a problem.

When I started designing bfd in 89 or 90 I started with a.out. Of course these days weвЂ™ve partially circled back with write protected executable blocks and execute permission forbidden to data and stack. There were still plenty of Harvard architecture machines (split I/ D) space.

#BETRAYAL AT KRONDOR USED VENDOR CODE#

Separating code and data wasnвЂ™t even really needed but back then it wasnвЂ™t clear that (almost) every machine would be a von Neumann architecture. But remember back then a lot of stuff was still written in assembler and machines were not that powerful, so something simple was not only sufficient but better.

Later some symbols and a bit of debugging info was added. вЂњa.outвЂќ is barely a format: just a block of executable, a block of data initialization and an integer to say how large the (uninitialized) heap should be. The linker output (the a.out file) will be in whatever is considered native by the compiler, which for most people is the format of the system they are running the compiler on.

Betrayal at krondor used vendor