Prior art (FatELF: universal binaries for Linux) [LWN.net]

Prior art (FatELF: universal binaries for Linux)

Posted Oct 29, 2009 13:32 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304)
In reply to: Prior art (FatELF: universal binaries for Linux) by eru
Parent article: FatELF: universal binaries for Linux

DomainOS didn't use this feature for multiple architectures, as far as I know: this was in the BSD/SysV war days, and they had multiple user-switchable 'universes', so apps could be marked as being BSD or SysV-specific, you could have distinct libraries with apparently identical names for each universe, and you could switch from BSD to SysV at any time. You could even reference paths in the other universe via //$UNIVERSE/... (where $UNIVERSE is the name of the universe, of course).

POSIX still contains a special case allowing // at the root to mean something different from / (in all other cases, strings of consecutive /s in pathnames are collapsed to /). Samba of course benefits from this.

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Prior art (FatELF: universal binaries for Linux)

Posted Nov 7, 2009 18:30 UTC (Sat) by dfa (✭ supporter ✭, #6767) [Link]

Domain/OS got fat binaries, very much as described in this article, with
the advent of the RISC based DN10000s, follow-on to the Motorola 680x0s.

It was very common to provide locally needed binaries on local disk,
then access the rest across the (ring) network. An administrator could
opt to load the single architectures onto separate shared directories
or could load the fat versions for universal use into a single directory.
This feature made diskless boot support painless.

The accommodation of three different OS conventions (Domain, BSD, and SysV)
was handled in filename space, as described, using environmental variables
which the filesystem used in creating the actual names accessed. It was
very cool, and extremely convenient for setting up personal/group/corporate
tailorings.

The DomainOS "//" convention was used to access the local machine's
"network root", the set of host names known to the local host, a very
neat network naming space for files was the result.