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ELF Tool Chain Files

BSD licensed ELF toolchain

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Release Notes for Elftoolchain Software Version 0.6.1

About The Project

The Elftoolchain project develops BSD-licensed implementations of essential compilation tools and libraries for handling ELF based program objects.

About The Release

This is the first release on the v0.6 "stable" code line.

Since our prior v0.5.1 release, we have added support for building the project on additional operating systems, namely DragonFlyBSD, Minix and OpenBSD. A number of bugs were fixed, and the project's documentation has been improved.

No new utilities are being introduced in this release.

Libraries and Utilities

This release comprises the following libraries and utilities.

Name	Description
ar	Archive manager.
addr2line	Debug tool.
brandelf	Manage the ELF brand on executables.
c++filt	Translate encoded symbols.
elfcopy	Copy and translate between object formats.
elfdump	Diagnostic tool.
findtextrel	Find undesired text relocations.
libdwarf	DWARF access library.
libelf	ELF access library.
mcs	Manage comment sections.
nm	List symbols in an ELF object.
ranlib	Add archive symbol tables to an archive.
readelf	Display ELF information.
size	List object sizes.
strings	Extract printable strings.
strip	Discard information from ELF objects.

Documentation

Each public API and invocable utility has a reference manual entry. We currently offer 330 manual entries, documented in 189 manual pages.

Additionally, this release contains the following documentation:

Name	Description
libelf-by-example	A tutorial introduction to libelf.

Test Suites

The release contains the following test suites:

Name	Description
ar	Test the ar utility.
elfcopy	Test the elfcopy utility.
elfdump	Test the elfdump utility.
libdwarf	Test the libdwarf library.
libelf	Test the libelf library.
nm	Test the nm utility.

System Requirements

This software is designed to run on Unix(TM)-like operating systems such as the BSD-family of operating systems and GNU/Linux.

This release has been built and tested on the following operating systems:

Operating System	Version	Supported Architectures
DragonFly BSD	2.10.1	i386
FreeBSD	v8.2	amd64 & i386
Minix	3.2.0	i386
NetBSD	v5.0.2	i386
OpenBSD	v5.0	i386
Ubuntu GNU/Linux	10.04LTS	i386 & x86_64

Installation and Upgrades

Installation

Instructions for building and installing this software from source are described in the file "INSTALL".

Upgrading

There are no special considerations for upgrading from the prior (v0.5.1) release.

Release Information

Changes in this release

The source tree has been ported to DragonFlyBSD, Minix and OpenBSD.

Other significant changes include:

• ar
  • A file descriptor exhaustion bug was fixed [ticket #388].
  • Support for building with newer versions of libarchive.
  • Memory errors were corrected.
• brandelf
  • The brandelf utility will try to preserve the layout of the ELF object being updated [ticket #375].
• elfcopy/strip/mcs
  • Fixed a critical bug: when stripping an object, properly handle a segment containing exactly one section of type SHT_NOBITS [changeset 2540].
  • A few memory leaks were fixed.
• elfdump
  • Compatibility with Solaris(TM) elfdump was improved.
  • Memory errors were corrected.
• libdwarf
  • Partial support for DWARF4 has been added [ticket #394]
  • An infinite loop bug was fixed [ticket #396].
  • Memory related errors were fixed.
• libelf
  • Extension APIs have been added, for the internal use of the project.
  • Memory related errors were fixed.
• libelf-by-example
  • The diagrams in the tutorial have been reworked and the text has been improved.
• libelftc
  • New helper functions were added, for the internal use of the project.
• nm
  • The behavior of the -o option was brought in line with POSIX.
  • Memory leaks were fixed.
• readelf
  • Compatibility with GNU readelf was improved.
  • The -x and -p options now accept section names in addition to section numbers.
  • A crash when dumping sections of type SHT_NOBITS was corrected.
• size
  • Memory leaks were fixed.

All our utilities now accept --help and --version command-line options.

Apart from code changes, a number of manual pages were improved.

Outstanding Issues

There were no outstanding issues at the time of the release.

Known Limitations

This release has the following limitations:

• Test coverage: Our test suites are being developed; test coverage is still partial.
• Performance and memory use: Our tools have not been fully analyzed for their memory use or for their performance characteristics.

Test Statistics

The test summary for this release is presented below:

Suite	Tests(32&64bit)	DragonFly(i386)	FreeBSD(i386 & amd64)	NetBSD(i386)	Ubuntu 10.04LTS(i386 & x86_64)
ar	235 & 230	P:235	P:235 & P:230	P:235	P:235 & P:230
elfcopy	156	P:156	P:156	P:156	P:156
elfdump	155	P:155	P:155	P:155	P:155
libdwarf	133	P:133	P:133	P:133	P:133
libelf	1024	P:1020, U:4	P:1020, U:4	P:1020, U:4	P:1020, U:4
nm	183	P:183	P:183	P:183	P:183

Key:

P:	Test successes.
F:	Test failures.
U:	Unresolved tests.

Notes

• The test suite for ar contains five tests that are applicable only on 32-bit systems.
• Four test cases in the libelf test suite cannot be tested on account of shortcomings in the test infrastructure in the current release.

More Information

The project's website is at http://elftoolchain.sourceforge.net/.

Developer Community

The project's developers may be contacted using the mailing list:elftoolchain-developers@lists.sourceforge.net.

Reporting Bugs

Please use our Trac instance for viewing existing bug reports and for submitting new bug reports.

Copyright and License

This software is copyright its authors, and is distributed under theBSD License.

Source: README.rst, updated 2012-09-25