d daedalus

Native Binary

Packaging a Native Binary

daedalus can package a pre-compiled ELF binary into a self-extracting executable. No runtime embedding is needed — just the binary and its shared libraries.

Detection

The builder detects a native binary when a single ELF executable is found in the app directory and no other runtime (Python, Node, Java, etc.) is detected.

my-binary/
  my-app          ← ELF executable (auto-detected)
  libfoo.so       ← optional shared library

Build

daedalus build ./my-binary -o my-binary.de

The builder:

  1. detects the ELF binary via the \x7fELF magic bytes;
  2. resolves its shared library dependencies via the ELF analyzer;
  3. packages the binary + libraries into the app layer;
  4. compresses and assembles the .de.

How it works

No runtime interpreter is embedded. The launcher:

  1. extracts the binary and its .so dependencies to the cache;
  2. sets LD_LIBRARY_PATH to include the extracted library directories;
  3. execvps the binary directly.

Shared library resolution

The Rust ELF analyzer reads DT_NEEDED, DT_RPATH, and DT_RUNPATH entries from the ELF header to find all transitive shared library dependencies. No host ldd is required.

daedalus inspect my-binary.de
# layers:
#   - app    2.1MB compressed / 8.4MB raw  (binary + .so files)

Cross-compilation

Native binaries cannot be cross-compiled by daedalus — the binary must already be built for the target architecture. Use daedalus build --target aarch64 only for interpreted runtimes (Python, etc.) where the interpreter can be downloaded for the target arch.

Known limitations

  • Only ELF binaries are supported (no PE/Windows, no Mach-O/macOS).
  • Statically linked binaries (no .so dependencies) work perfectly — the smallest possible .de.
  • Binaries with unusual loader paths (/lib/ld-linux.so.2) may need the loader embedded in the rootfs.
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