Ethereal-dev: Re: [Ethereal-dev] Are Linux plugins compatible with FreeBSD ?

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From: "Guy Harris" <gharris@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Mon, 2 Aug 2004 17:06:16 -0700 (PDT)
Pierre JUHEN said:
> Can I take the plugin.so an plugin.la files from Linux to FreeBSD,

Not necessarily.

We can't *guarantee* compatibility, simply because no Linux distribution
guarantees that the ABI for OS services is the same as it is on a
particular version of FreeBSD, and no version of FreeBSD guarantees ABI
compatibility in the other direction (FreeBSD can run Linux executables,
but that's done at the system call level, not at the shared library level;
I think the FreeBSD Linux compatibility environment just runs Linux shared
libraries).

Similarly, if you're using GLib or GTK+ in the plugin, we can't guarantee
that the versions of the library on the two OSes are binary-compatible,
even if they're built from the same source.

And it might even be that the FreeBSD run-time linker will only load
FreeBSD shared object files, not files for other ELF-based OSes.

So it might happen to work, but we can't guarantee that - or, worse, it
might immediately appear to work but might fail in ways not immediately
obvious.

> or do I need to recompile ?

You should recompile.