Adrian Cochrane
Usually the read & write implementations for each format doesn't take that much code, but ELF for some reason takes a lot more. Can anyone please explain what ELF is about?
LibBFD also provides e.g. a hashmap implementation as being central to many GNU Binutils commands.
There's several trivial (or at least as trivial as C gets) commands, though I'll have to discuss the major commands over the next two days...
2/2 Fin, for now! Next: GNU Assembler & linkers.
Adrian Cochrane
"Binary" executable files contains more than raw machine code your CPU's control unit can *directly* understand. There's additional labelling for our sake, & for linkers (though I haven't gotten through *that* code yet).
Whilst today's topic GNU Binutils contains a suite of commands, the core of *most* of them is libbfd. LibBFD's headerfiles are predominantly C structs & macros defining the numerous formats (including archive files) GNU supports, it also implements methodtables for them.
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Adrian Cochrane
@ekaitz_zarraga No, it's not rhetorical.
How does it differ from other object formats? Why does it require so much more code?
Thiago Jung Bauermann
@ekaitz_zarraga @alcinnz actually ELF offers two complementary views into the binary:
The section header, meant to be used by the linker at build time, tells what are the contents of each section of the binary (e.g., symbols, relocation entries, debug info).
The program header, meant to be used by the loader (e.g., ld.so) to create the process image, tells which parts of the binary ("segments") go where in memory, and which sections they are made of.
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