Messages in this thread | | | From | Måns Rullgård <> | Subject | Re: RFC: executable archive | Date | Tue, 20 Apr 2004 14:28:24 +0200 |
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Terje Eggestad <terje.eggestad@scali.com> writes:
> Hello everybody > > I wanted to share and idea (and I'm sure I going to get booh'ed of the > list but...) with you all. > > One thing have annoyed me for a long time while writing perl progs, and > that it not possible to "link" it, in that programs must span multiple > files to be manageable as they grow. I'm sure we all agree that only > trivial programs can be coded in a single source file. > The annoyment stems from the fact that a single "executable" must be > distributed as multiple files. > A problem with perl, that Larry Wall should have though of right? > > Same problem with python (i'm just learning), and a collection of .class > files for java. > The problem is compounded that all decent scripting languages allow > compiled modules in the shaped of a shared object, which make it really > hard on the developers of the scripting engine to make single exec. > > What would solve it is have an executable archive, in where you put the > top level script, subscripts, shared objects, and any other file it may > need. > > It would be nice to have a general solution to the problem. > > My first though would be to make a stub, and put the ar file in the data > area of the process, something akind to self extracting zip files on > dos/windoze. > A couple of problems: > a) you can't "mount" the ar file to make it visible to the process as a > part of it's file system view. ( Atleast not without intercepting a > whole lot of libc calls) > b) unpacking it somewhere would clobber up your fs as it would not be > cleaned up after a program crash or machine crash. > > Ideally I'd like to see the files in the ar as in the cwd, but that > would make a namespace collision possible. > > The second though would be to do it in the kernel, which would go > something like this: > > - let the exec() handler in the kernel recognize the exec-ar, just like > it recognizes the #! magic. > - use the loopback mount device to mount the ar (read only) under > /proc/self/archive > (- it would be nice to do something to the env's like adding > /proc/self/archive to PATH, LD:LIBRARY_PATH, of honor a file like > /proc/self/env to modify the envs) > - now exec the file /proc/self/archive/main
Apart from the /proc manipulations, all of the above could be accomplished using binfmt_misc and a suitable wrapper program.
-- Måns Rullgård mru@kth.se
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