There has been repeated discussion on removing a.out support, the most recent was[1]. Having read through a bunch of the discussion it looks like no one has see any reason why we need to keep a.out support. The m68k maintainer has even come out in favor of removing a.out support[2]. At a practical level with only two rarely used architectures building a.out support, it gets increasingly hard to test and to care about. Which means the code will almost certainly bit-rot. Let's see if anyone cares about a.out support on the last two architectures that build it, by disabling the build of the support in Kconfig. If anyone cares, this can be easily reverted, and we can then have a discussion about what it is going to take to support a.out binaries in the long term. Cc: Richard Henderson <rth@xxxxxxxxxxx> Cc: Ivan Kokshaysky <ink@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> Cc: Matt Turner <mattst88@xxxxxxxxx> Cc: linux-alpha@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Cc: Geert Uytterhoeven <geert@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> Cc: linux-m68k@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx [1] https://lkml.kernel.org/r/20220113160115.5375-1-bp@xxxxxxxxx [2] https://lkml.kernel.org/r/CAMuHMdUbTNNr16YY1TFe=-uRLjg6yGzgw_RqtAFpyhnOMM5Pvw@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx Signed-off-by: "Eric W. Biederman" <ebiederm@xxxxxxxxxxxx> --- Kees do you think you could add this to your execve branch? I think this should be a complimentary patch to Borislav Petkov's patch at the top of this tread to remove a.out support on x86. arch/alpha/Kconfig | 1 - arch/m68k/Kconfig | 1 - 2 files changed, 2 deletions(-) diff --git a/arch/alpha/Kconfig b/arch/alpha/Kconfig index 4e87783c90ad..14c97acea351 100644 --- a/arch/alpha/Kconfig +++ b/arch/alpha/Kconfig @@ -12,7 +12,6 @@ config ALPHA select FORCE_PCI if !ALPHA_JENSEN select PCI_DOMAINS if PCI select PCI_SYSCALL if PCI - select HAVE_AOUT select HAVE_ASM_MODVERSIONS select HAVE_PCSPKR_PLATFORM select HAVE_PERF_EVENTS diff --git a/arch/m68k/Kconfig b/arch/m68k/Kconfig index 936e1803c7c7..268b3860d40d 100644 --- a/arch/m68k/Kconfig +++ b/arch/m68k/Kconfig @@ -17,7 +17,6 @@ config M68K select GENERIC_CPU_DEVICES select GENERIC_IOMAP select GENERIC_IRQ_SHOW - select HAVE_AOUT if MMU select HAVE_ASM_MODVERSIONS select HAVE_DEBUG_BUGVERBOSE select HAVE_EFFICIENT_UNALIGNED_ACCESS if !CPU_HAS_NO_UNALIGNED -- 2.29.2