Elftoolchain

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

Home page: https://elftoolchain.sourceforge.io/.

News / Recent Posts

• Upcoming Opensource Work - Apr 28, 2022
• Elftoolchain v0.7.1 - Feb 20, 2016
• New release: ELF Toolchain v0.6.1 - Sep 25, 2012
• A build system for the Elftoolchain project - Jul 7, 2012

Sub-Projects

See also: Roadmap.

• A text-to-ELF/DWARF compiler

  Human-readable, precise specification of ELF and DWARF fragments.

• A PEG parser generator for the base system

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

Articles

(Tutorial) Libelf by Example

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

It covers:

1. Getting started with libelf: obtaining a handle to an ELF object, establishing a working ELF version, and handling errors reported by libelf.

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. How data is stored inside ELF sections, the ELF Section Header Table, and how to traverse the sections in an ELF object.

5. 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.

6. ar archives: their structure, and how to read the contents of these archives using the APIs provided by libelf.

Download Links

• Libelf by Example (at Leanpub).

• Libelf by Example (at SourceForge).