ELF dynamic loader name [was: sbrk(2) broken]

[Danny Braniss]

> On Sun, 06 Jan 2008 09:56:32 +0200
> Danny Braniss <danny at cs.huji.ac.il> wrote:
> 
> > what Apple has is one file, that will run the appropiate binary if run
> > on an i386 or a ppc, not 2 different files - universal binary - not rosetta.
> 
> Sure, but that's got a bunch of different driving factors.  I
> don't know, for example, whether you can build a four-way
> executable (ia32, x86_64, ppc, ppc64).  Well, you probably can,
> but I'd be a bit surprised if anyone has.  FreeBSD supports even
> more architectures: it just doesn't scale.  The best bet for
> something that has to run everywhere is probably LLVM or TNEF.
> 
> The advantage that Unix has over MacOS is that we aren't trying
> to squeeze everything into single "application" directories.  So
> it's reasonable to have "share", and select executables on the
> basis of PATH.  That's how it has worked before.  Most sites
> don't have more than two or three different architectures to
> support, anyway.
> 
This argument has sides/issues, one is the 'distribution', and here I agree
that one universal-fit-all is not the way to go.

I'm concerned in trying to solve a problem we are facing here, were 
students/researchers
write code, and soon will be hit by incompatible platforms.

> If we do get much further with multi-architecture bin and lib,
> and people actively use these on diskless setups or
> multi-architecture hosts (amd64/ia32, or other 64/32 bit
> combinations being the most common) then perhaps it would be nice
> to have a share/bin where platform-independent scripts (shell,
> perl, python) as well as dynamic-translated binaries (JVM, LLVM,
> etc) can live?
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> -- 
> Andrew

danny