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

[Mike Frysinger <vapier at gentoo dot org>]

On Sunday 17 January 2010 20:01:02 Daisuke HATAYAMA wrote:
> From: Daniel Jacobowitz <dan@codesourcery.com>
> > 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.

thanks for this clarification.  i thought it weird we'd need normal ELFs with 
that many program headers, but it makes perfect sense for core files.
-mike

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