Re: [RFC][PATCH 0/3] readelf and libbfd: Add Extended Numbering Support for ELF

[Daisuke HATAYAMA <d dot hatayama at jp dot fujitsu dot com>]

From: Daniel Jacobowitz <dan@codesourcery.com>
Subject: Re: [RFC][PATCH 0/3] readelf and libbfd: Add Extended Numbering Support for ELF
Date: Sun, 17 Jan 2010 09:16:54 -0500

> On Fri, Jan 15, 2010 at 07:53:26AM -0800, Ian Lance Taylor wrote:
>> You mean that they currently have a 2 byte length.
>> 
>> I very sincerely hope that we never have an ELF file with more than
>> 4,294,967,295 segments.
>> 
>> It's hard enough to understand having more than 65,535 segments
>> (sections, sure; segments?).
> 
> It's mainly, as he wrote later, for core files.  I'm surprised you
> haven't complained about this limitation yourself :-)  If your thread
> stacks were allocated with guard pages, a core dump with over 64k threads
> should have over 64k segments.

The reason why the extension is limited to core files is that in other
object formats, there seems little possibility of program headers
increasing rapidly.

Of course, if it is necessary, I will implemet it responsibly.

Thanks.