> > Another idea that was muted many moons ago was to get the exec call
> > to recognise the AR format files.  It would look in the archive for a
> > file that was named like the CPU. Ie. "ix86", "m68k-nfpu", etc. and
> > then load that file.  This fits the classical idea of a fat file.
> 
> Yes.  Unless the archive is very carefully constructed, though, it
> would have to treat the file like an OMAGIC (or is it NMAGIC?) file,
> since page boundaries in the executable won't in general be aligned on
> page boundaries on disk.  Perhaps such a situation should just impose a
> performance penalty; perhaps it should produce ENOEXEC.

It is trivial to 'very carefully construct' a binary with the proper
format to have it be demand pageable.

In fact, once i get around to reworking execve() one more time, it
should also be trivial to implement support for fat binaries in the
kernel.


chris