Re: FatELF & patents

[David Miller]

From: Rayson Ho <raysonlogin@xxxxxxxxx>
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.
--
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at  http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at  http://www.tux.org/lkml/