What's in a Linux Executable?

Re:What's in a Linux Executable? by bregma on Thursday October 29, 2020 @07:11AM (#24929225)

For those interested, the current de facto ELF standard is http://www.sco.com/developers/gabi/latest/contents.html (yes, for historical reasons, that SCO) although there is a rumour it will move to a GitHub project at some unspecified time in the future.

There is, in fact, no de jure standard for the ELF binary format. It is, however, pretty much a universal standard format for executable, dynamic shared object, and partially-linked compiled file format used on every platform except Apple and Microsoft systems.

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Re:What's in a Linux Executable? by fasterthanlime on Thursday October 29, 2020 @11:57AM (#24931866)

The most recent ones I've found were https://github.com/hjl-tools/x86-psABI/wiki/X86-psABI which have now been moved to GitLab and no longer have pre-built PDFs? It's a hard "standard" to track for sure.

In a pinch, the uClibc website will do: https://uclibc.org/docs/psABI-x86_64.pdf

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Re:What's in a Linux Executable? by chandlore on Friday October 30, 2020 @01:20PM (#24944550)

There are pre-built PDFs on the GitLab repo, but they're pretty well buried. If you view a CI job you can download the generated artifacts.

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Re:What's in a Linux Executable? by pjmlp on Thursday October 29, 2020 @08:30AM (#24929771)

Besides Aix mentioned on the sibling comment, mainframes and some non-POSIX embedded OSes.

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Re:What's in a Linux Executable? by apaprocki on Thursday October 29, 2020 @07:51AM (#24929499)

(... and systems like AIX, which use XCOFF. A major pain point for anyone needing to write cross-platform tooling.)

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Re:What's in a Linux Executable? by pjmlp on Thursday October 29, 2020 @08:31AM (#24929779)

I actually felt at home with XCOFF, a UNIX that used the same ideas as Symbian and Windows for dynamic link libraries, including import/export definition modules.

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