Why ELF instead of SOM?
We don’t have source for a complete compiler toolchain for SOM, lacking a linker. Under BSD, we have always just used the HP-UX linker running in compatibility mode. Because ELF is much more widely used than SOM, over the years we’ve invested many man-years developing its PA version. Since it has been our intention to switch to ELF for some time anyway, this seemed like a good opportunity. The big downside is that due to a fundamental mismatch between the generic ELF BFD code and the needs of the PA ELF linker, the linker is about four times as slow as the HP-UX SOM linker. We plan to address linker performance in the future. It is possible there will be a native SOM linker in the future (we have done some of the BFD support), but in any case the HP-UX linker will run when compatibility is integrated, and we plan to continue to recognize SOM format in Lites.
