liberate /lib [LWN.net]

liberate /lib

Posted Oct 29, 2009 3:06 UTC (Thu) by ncm (guest, #165)
Parent article: FatELF: universal binaries for Linux

This looks immediately practical as an alternative to multilib ia32 and amd64. Instead of /lib and /lib64, each library package would contain a .so that goes in /lib, as usual, and the right part of it gets used at load time. To me that's enough reason to go ahead with it. Anything else that might (or might not) be made to work, someday, is extra.

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liberate /lib

Posted Oct 29, 2009 13:29 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Yes indeed. Multiarch works, but requires support from the build system (and some don't support relocation of the libdir) and even from applications, if they load plugins (and glib and gtk at least hardwire module loading from subdirectories of "lib", so distros have to patch this away today).

It looks like fat binaries instead of multiarch would pretty much Just Work without requiring such a degree of thought (not that it's *much* thought, but it seems to be too much to expect from e.g. the gtk devs).

liberate /lib

Posted Oct 30, 2009 0:48 UTC (Fri) by ikm (guest, #493) [Link]

Yes. I actually think it's the only real use for this. I used to hate the idea of FatELF before, but I'd really love to have this kind of lib on my system.