Elftoolchain

The Elftoolchain project offers liberally-licensed tools and libraries for program development. The project has been in existence since 2008.

Downstream Uses

Elftoolchain has been designed to be suitable for inclusion into the base systems of OS projects. Examples of such uses include:

FreeBSD: contrib/elftoolchain - most tools and libraries.
Minix: external/bsd/elftoolchain - libelf and libdwarf.
NetBSD: src/external/bsd/elftoolchain - libelf and libdwarf.
RTEMS: rtems-tools/rtemstoolkit/elftoolchain - libelf, libdwarf and libelftc.

Elftoolchain’s tools and libraries are also available as standalone packages:

Some of the these projects may be suitable for GSoC projects.

Please see also: Roadmap.

A Text to ELF/DWARF Compiler

Human-readable specifications of ELF and DWARF fragments.
A PEG Parser Generator for the Base System

An easy-to-use parser generator with good error recovery.

This is a short introduction to libelf, a library for manipulating ELF objects.

It covers:

Getting started with libelf: obtaining a handle to an ELF object, establishing a working ELF version, and handling errors reported by libelf.
How ELF data structures are laid out in-memory and on disk, the notions of "file representation" and "memory representation", how to write applications that can handle non-native binaries.
ELF Segments and the ELF Program Header Table, retrieving the program header table from an ELF executable and the meaning of the fields of a program header table entry.
How data is stored inside ELF sections, the ELF Section Header Table, and how to traverse the sections in an ELF object.
How to create new ELF objects: the rules for ordering individual API calls, the default object layout implemented by libelf, and how to specify custom layouts.
ar archives: their structure, and how to read the contents of these archives using the APIs provided by libelf.