On March 28, 1995,
H.J. Lu, the maintainer of the binary
distributions of GCC, LIBC and the associated binary
utilities (binutils), posted in comp.os.linux.announce:
Hi, In the next few weeks, Linux will move to the ELF binary format. A new set of the ELF-based development tools will be released for testing during the week of March 27. All the new binaries generated by the new development tools will be in ELF. We have compiled the kernel, XFree86 3.1.1 and many packages in ELF. They are all working fine. The next module utilities will also support ELF. In the meantime, a new and last a.out DLL shared C library 4.7.x will also be provided for bug fixing. All the old a.out binaries should continue running fine. But all the new features will only be in the Linux C library 5.x.x which will be in ELF only. To help smoothly transfer to ELF, I hope the commercial software vendors please get in touch with me. I will provide all the necessary supports to migrate to ELF, which should be very easy. I'd like to see the ELF versions of Motif, Netscape, Mac emulator, ... to just name a few. I have some documentations and examples which are useful for using ELF. Thanks. H.J