Julia Evans

Day 41: Linkers are upsetting

Today I spent pretty much the whole day trying to figure out what’s going on with a linker problem I’m having. I’ve fixed it, but I don’t understand why it’s fixed, and I am having no luck.

Allison and I paired on it for a bit, and we discovered that if we order the sections .text .rodata .data .bss, then the ELF file works correctly, but if they’re in any other order it doesn’t work. There’s a gist with the offending linker scripts.

I also created a StackOverflow question but it is not getting any love.

To compensate, I wrote a tiny start of a tutorial about binary formats.

Day 39: Writing malloc wrong, for fun Day 42: How to run a simple ELF executable, from scratch (I don't know)