Re: FatELF patches...

[David Hagood <david.hagood@gmail.com>]

On Thu, 2009-10-29 at 22:19 -0400, Ryan C. Gordon wrote:
> Having heard a bunch of commentary, and made a bunch of changes based on 
> some really good feedback, here are my hopefully-final FatELF patches.

I hope it's not too late for a request for consideration: if we start
having fat binaries, could one of the "binaries" be one of the "not
quite compiled code" formats like Architecture Neutral Distribution
Format (ANDF), such that, given a fat binary which does NOT support a
given CPU, you could at least in theory process the ANDF section to
create the needed target binary? Bonus points for being able to then
append the newly created section to the file.

That way you could have a binary that supported some "common" subset of
CPUs (e.g. x86,x86-64,PPC,ARM) but still run on the "not common"
processors (Alpha, MIPS, Sparc) - it would just take a bit more time to
start.

As an embedded systems guy who is looking to have to support multiple
CPU types, this is really very interesting to me.