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

Prior art (FatELF: universal binaries for Linux)

Posted Oct 29, 2009 14:51 UTC (Thu) by dtlin (subscriber, #36537)
In reply to: Prior art (FatELF: universal binaries for Linux) by louai
Parent article: FatELF: universal binaries for Linux

$ uname -m
x86_64
$ setarch i386 uname -m
i686

I don't see what the problem is.

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Prior art (FatELF: universal binaries for Linux)

Posted Oct 30, 2009 21:30 UTC (Fri) by giraffedata (guest, #1954) [Link]

My initial reaction was the same: that we already have multi-file packages, so isn't it more natural just to have a binary for each architecture?

But when I thought about the real complaints (above) about the difficulty of living with /lib and /lib64, I realized this: which binary is required is a characteristic of facilities under user space -- kernel and/or machine. So placing the burden of choosing one on user space is wrong. And files are user space things; the kernel should not navigate directories.

Now, where having multiple architecture binaries in a single system (filesystem) isn't useful, I would prefer a package with multiple binaries, where the installer installs in /lib the relevant one.