Messages in this thread |  | | | Subject | Re: FatELF patches... | | From | Eric Windisch <> | | Date | Tue, 03 Nov 2009 01:43:39 -0500 |
First, I apologize if this message gets top-posted or otherwise improperly threaded, as I'm not currently a subscriber to the list (I can no longer handle the daily traffic). I politely ask that I be CC'ed on any replies.
In response to Alan's request for a FatELF use-case, I'll submit two of my own.
I have customers which operate low-memory x86 virtual machine instances. Until recently, these ran with as little as 64MB of RAM. Many customers have chosen 32-bit distributions for these systems, but would like the flexibility of scaling beyond 4GB of memory. These customers would like the choice of migrating to 64-bit without having to reinstall their distribution.
Furthermore, I'm involved in several "cloud computing" initiatives, including interoperability efforts. There has been discussion of assuring portability of virtual machine images across varying infrastructure services. I could see how FatELF could be part of a solution to this problem, enabling a single image to function against host services running a variety of architectures.
As for negatives: I'm running ZFS which now supports deduplication, so this might potentially eliminate my own concerns in regard to storage. Eventually, Btrfs will provide this capability under Linux directly. The networking isn't much of an issue either, as I have my own mirrors for the popular distributions. While this isn't the typical end-user environment, it might be a typical environment for companies facing the unique problems FatELF solves.
I concede that there are a number of ways that solutions to these problems might be implemented, and FatELF binaries might not be the optimal solution. Regardless, I do feel that use cases do exist, even if there are questions and concerns about the implementation.
-- Regards, Eric Windisch
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