Fedora with Universal Binaries?

Dan Williams dcbw at redhat.com
Thu Oct 22 17:49:48 UTC 2009


On Thu, 2009-10-22 at 19:43 +0200, Jochen Schmitt wrote:
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> Am 22.10.2009 19:38, schrieb Jon Masters:
> > Except, they're not really ELF binaries. ELF doesn't allow you to do
> > both at the same time in the headers, so this adds a new header and is
> > essentially an encapsulation for other ELF files. Thus, a kernel patch
> > is required and it would be some time before all kernels supported it.
> > I'm not against the notion of this...but I think some of the usual
> > suspects need to get involved in standardizing such an ELF hack.
> >
> > (You might be able to do something with binfmt_misc as a hack)
> >
> > Jon.
> >
> Creating FatELF binaries doesn't solve any x86_64 related issues.
> 
> For example:
> 
> Old releases of blender was not able to creates proper .blend files
> when the
> binary was compiled for x86_64. In this case the created files was not
> usable
> on the x86_32 release.

That's just a cross-platform compat issue.  People had issues like that
for years porting between Mac and Windows with different type sizes and
endianness.  Without and direct knowledge of the problem, that sounds
like somebody forgot to either (a) use an inherently cross-platform file
format like XML, or (b) forgot to write sane file format encode/decode
routines that were cross-platform clean, or (c) included executable code
in the file format specification (which is pretty stupid).  Or?

We'd expect a program built on any platform to save/load a specific file
format written by that same program built on any other platform.
Otherwise that program is just broken.

Dan
 




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