PSARC/2007/509 elfedit

[James Carlson]

Ali Bahrami writes:
> Consolidation Private. The overall goal is to open it up, so having it
> open to ON is a reasonable first step. Anyone planning on using these
> interfaces is warned to expect a little churn, but I've implemented
> enough modules to have confidence that it is close to its final form.

OK; that sounds good.

> You are correct that elfedit will go 64-bit immediately on any system
> that can support it. This is like elfdump, and unlike mdb. Either version
> of elfedit (32 or 64-bit binary) is able to edit either form of ELF object
> (ELFCLASS32 or ELFCLASS64), so the reason to prefer 64-bit is for address
> space and large file support.

I see.

> The mechanism used to handle this is in fact based on isaexec(). The
> linker tools all use a common internal function named conv_check_native()
> that examines the LD_NOEXEC_64 environment variable to decide what to
> do, and then uses isaexec() to do the work. elfedit is following this
> family pattern.

I was actually referring to /usr/lib/isaexec, which is used as a
hard-link for dozens of utilities with identical needs.

I realize the answer for elfdump might just be "history," but why does
elfedit follow elfdump's pattern?

And why would a user want to (or need to) set LD_NOEXEC_64 ... ?

-- 
James Carlson, Solaris Networking              <james.d.carlson at sun.com>
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