What sorts of problems can cause programs not to build with ELF tools?
There don’t seem to be many problems that cause programs to fail to build under BSD/OS 4.x, if they built properly under BSD/OS 3.0. Here are a few problems that we do know about: • GCC 2 is a pig. It can consume surprising amounts of virtual memory. On very small systems, GCC 2 can thrash or use up all of your swap space (or both). Even otherwise idle systems with 32 MB of memory will occasionally thrash a little when compiling large source files. I would recommend at least 32 MB of memory in any system that will be doing a substantial number of compiles. It was primarily this resource issue that led BSDI to stay with GCC 1 for so long. Fortunately our customers (and the company 🙂 are buying systems with much more memory these days. (Amusing fact: the first machine at the company to run BSD/OS was a 30 MHz 386DX with 5 MB of memory. Even GCC 1 made that machine thrash — it took an hour to build a kernel from scratch, and kernels were much smaller then.) • You can’t use a.out object
