Re: Support Sun extensions in readelf?

[David Miller <davem at davemloft dot net>]

From: Rainer Orth <ro@CeBiTec.Uni-Bielefeld.DE>
Date: Wed, 10 Mar 2010 12:12:00 +0100

> As in the case of the VER_FLG_INFO flag, Sun has specified and
> implemented a couple of extensions to the ELF format and has clearly
> documented them in their Linker and Libraries Guide:
> 
> 	http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/doc/819-0690/chapter6-46512?l=en&a=view
> 
> While I have no intention of supporting but a small subset of them in
> gas and gld, it may be useful to at least allow readelf to understand
> them in Sun as and/or Sun ld generated objects.  Would appropriate
> patches likely be accepted if following the coding standards, or is
> support for vendor extensions generally frowned up?
> 
> Nothing to happen immediately, just a question in advance of events :-)

I think this would be great, and if you want I can help you
with some of this work.

There are even some features Sun's ELF has that the GNU
tools might want to support at some point, such as the
data section compression bits which are primarily targetted
at fortran programs.

So it really can't hurt to add detection and reporting of
these ELF features to at least readelf.