Universal binaries were one of the things Apple brought to my attention but it has never really caught on outside of well Mac OS X lands. I always found that to be a bit weird especially once I got deeper into system administration since rebuilding each program for each architechure you run on even though they share the same os version and patch level remains a pain.
Found this off reddit programming today and thought I would pass it along, clearly they are in the early stages but glad to see the idea being tried out.
FatELF is a file format that embeds multiple ELF binaries for different architectures into one file. This is the Linux equivalent of what Mac OS X calls "Universal Binaries." The format is very simple: it adds some accounting info at the start of the file, and then appends all the ELF binaries after it, adding padding for alignment. The end of the file isn't touched, so you can still do things like self-extracting .zip files for multiple architectures with FatELF.
FatELF lets you pack binaries into one file, seperated by OS ABI, OS ABI version, byte order and word size, and most importantly, CPU architecture.
Work is focused on GNU/Linux, but this could be applied to most modern Unix systems: the BSDs, Solaris, etc.
http://icculus.org/fatelf/ - Brian
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