On Wed, Apr 20, 2022 at 10:04:32PM +0200, Arnd Bergmann wrote: > On Wed, Apr 20, 2022 at 7:47 PM Kees Cook <keescook@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > > > Yeah, I was trying to understand why systems were using binfmt_flat and > > not binfmt_elf, given the mention of elf2flat -- is there really such a > > large kernel memory footprint savings to be had from removing > > binfmt_elf? > > I think the main reason for using flat binaries is nommu support on > m68k, xtensa and risc-v. The regular binfmt_elf support requires > an MMU, and the elf-fdpic variant is only available for arm and sh > at this point (the other nommu architectures got removed over time). I believe I made the elf-fdpic loader so that it's capable of loading normal non-fdpic elf files on nommu (1bde925d23), unless somebody broke that. I also seem to recall that capability being added to the main elf loader later. Rich
