On Mon, 10 Apr 1995, der Mouse wrote:

> > I want to know if there is/will be/is anybody working on the
> > following things for NetBSD:
> 
> Mostly, I don't know.  But a couple of things come to mind.
> 
> > 1. fat binaries
> 
> What's a fat binary?
> 
	A "fat" binary is one that has code for more than 1 architecture,
and when executed, the target machines knows what part of it to execute.

NeXT has this feature, and they are already "quad fat". The same physical
binaries now run on original NeXT hardware (motorola), 486+ machines,
HP pa-risc machines, and SUN sparc machines. The main motivation is less
filesystem duplication in a heterogenous-architecture environment. For a
large cluster of machines, the extra individual weight more than makes up 
for itself in terms of admin and fileserving from a single source.

--
James S. MacKinnon           Office: P-139 Avahd-Bhatia Physics Lab
Department of Physics        Voice : (403) 492-8226
University of Alberta        email : Jim.MacKinnon@Phys.UAlberta.CA
Edmonton, Canada T6G 2N5
        WWW:   http://www.phys.ualberta.ca/~jmack/jmack.html