Category: Programming

As we’ve seen, what linkers do is basically quite simple, but the details can get complicated. The complexity is because smart programmers can see small optimizations to speed up their programs a little bit, and somtimes the only place those optimizations can be implemented is the linker. Each such optimizations makes the linker a little…

So many things to talk about. Let’s go back and cover relocations in some more detail, with some examples. Relocations As I said back in part 2, a relocation is a computation to perform on the contents. And as I said yesterday, a relocation can also direct the linker to take other actions, like creating…

Shared Libraries Redux Yesterday I talked about how shared libraries work. I realized that I should say something about how linkers implement shared libraries. This discussion will again be ELF specific. When the program linker puts position dependent code into a shared library, it has to copy more of the relocations from the object file…

Shared Libraries We’ve talked a bit about what object files and executables look like, so what do shared libraries look like? I’m going to focus on ELF shared libraries as used in SVR4 (and GNU/Linux, etc.), as they are the most flexible shared library implementation and the one I know best. Windows shared libraries, known…

Continuing notes on linkers. Address Spaces An address space is simply a view of memory, in which each byte has an address. The linker deals with three distinct types of address space. Every input object file is a small address space: the contents have addresses, and the symbols and relocations refer to the contents by…