Month: September 2007

  • Linkers part 8

    ELF Segments Earlier I said that executable file formats were normally the same as object file formats. That is true for ELF, but with a twist. In ELF, object files are composed of sections: all the data in the file is accessed via the section table. Executables and shared libraries normally contain a section table,…

  • Linkers part 7

    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…