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objcopy --extract-symbol option keeping bogus sections/segments : wrong?
- From: Vincent Rubiolo <vincent dot rubiolo at windriver dot com>
- To: binutils at sourceware dot org
- Date: Mon, 16 Jul 2007 14:10:59 +0200
- Subject: objcopy --extract-symbol option keeping bogus sections/segments : wrong?
- References: <4688C306.6080809@windriver.com>
Hello again,
I am pinging again since my message might have been overlooked.
Thanks for your suggestions,
Vincent
Vincent Rubiolo wrote:
Hi gentle binutils maintainers,
I am writing to you about the newly added --extract-symbol of objcopy
(cf [1]) which, as Richard explained, we use to extract symbol files
from VxWorks kernels.
My concern is about the fact that the option zeroes out the
addresses/sizes, etc of the sections and segments in the file _instead_
of only keeping the relevant bits in. In some circumstances, this
confuses our kernel loader (which is used to load that stripped file)
since the segments within the file are marked as loadable but are of
empty size/address.
I have looked at the ELF spec [2] and while the standard says the image
can have supplementary segments/sections, it does not specify whether
they can be empty/marked PT_LOAD.
To me, there is no reason to have these bogus sections/segments in the
image and they should be removed. I think we should fix the file and not
the loader itself.
Is this a correct reasoning?
Thanks for your insight.
Vincent
PS: attaching readelf output on VxWorks symbol files
[1] http://sourceware.org/ml/binutils/2007-03/msg00004.html
[2] http://www.sco.com/developers/gabi/latest/contents.html
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