Messages in this thread | | | Date | Mon, 26 Oct 2009 14:54:28 -0700 (PDT) | Subject | Re: FatELF & patents | From | David Miller <> |
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From: Rayson Ho <raysonlogin@gmail.com> Date: Mon, 26 Oct 2009 12:59:22 -0500
> The patent mentions only one prior art: > > "One prior art attempt to provide a method for providing a single > application for a variety of architectures and formats is the ANDF > system, developed by OSF. This is an architecture neutral binary > format. A disadvantage of this scheme is that it requires conversion > to the native architecture at installation time." > > I don't think there is anything similar to Apple's fat binary or > universal binary -- a single executable that can be executed on > different processor families.
A variant of the Sparc SILO boot loader, called TILO, was doing this with Sparc Linux kernel images 15 or so years ago.
It packs a 32-bit and a 64-bit Linux kernel into one blob and figures out which one to actually boot once it figures out what kind of machine it is executing on.
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