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Binutils
The GNU Binary Utilities, or , are a set of programming tools for creating and managing binary programs, object files, libraries, profile data, and assembly source code. Tools They were originally written by programmers at Cygnus Solutions. The GNU Binutils are typically used in conjunction with compilers such as the GNU Compiler Collection (), build tools like , and the GNU Debugger (). Through the use of the Binary File Descriptor library (), most tools support the various object file formats supported by . Commands The include the following commands: elfutils Ulrich Drepper wrote , to partially replace GNU Binutils, purely for Linux and with support only for ELF and DWARF. It distributes three libraries with it for programmatic access. See also * GNU Core Utilities * GNU Debugger *ldd (Unix), list symbols imported by the object file; similar to * List of Unix commands *llvm provides similar set of tools * strace strace is a diagnostic, debugging and instruc ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Gold (linker)
In software engineering, gold is a linker for ELF files. It became an official GNU package and was added to binutils in March 2008 and first released in binutils version 2.19. gold was developed by Ian Lance Taylor and a small team at Google. The motivation for writing gold was to make a linker that is faster than the GNU linker, especially for large applications coded in C++. Unlike the GNU linker, gold does not use the BFD library to process object files. While this limits the object file formats it can process to ELF only, it is also claimed to result in a cleaner and faster implementation without an additional abstraction layer. The author cited complete removal of BFD as a reason to create a new linker from scratch rather than incrementally improve the GNU linker. This rewrite also fixes some bugs in old ld that break ELF files in various minor ways. To specify gold in a makefile, one sets the LD or LD environmental variable to ld.gold. To specify gold through a compiler o ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Binary File Descriptor Library
The Binary File Descriptor library (BFD) is the GNU Project's main mechanism for the portable manipulation of object files in a variety of formats. , it supports approximately 50 file formats for some 25 instruction set architectures. History When David Henkel-Wallace of Cygnus Support proposed developing the library as a way to open up new business opportunities for the company, Richard Stallman said that it would be difficult; David's response was that it wasn't such a "Big Fucking Deal". Abbreviated to "BFD", this became the library name. "Binary File Descriptor" was invented later as a backronym for "BFD". Design BFD works by presenting a common abstract view of object files. An object file has a "header" with descriptive info; a variable number of "sections" that each has a name, some attributes, and a block of data; a symbol table; relocation entries; and so forth. Internally, BFD translates the data from the abstract view into the details of the bit/byte layout re ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ar (Unix)
The archiver, also known simply as ar, is a Unix utility that maintains groups of files as a single archive file. Today, ar is generally used only to create and update static library files that the link editor or linker uses and for generating .deb packages for the Debian family; it can be used to create archives for any purpose, but has been largely replaced by tar for purposes other than static libraries. An implementation of ar is included as one of the GNU Binutils. In the Linux Standard Base (LSB), ar has been deprecated and is expected to disappear in a future release of that standard. The rationale provided was that "the LSB does not include software development utilities nor does it specify .o and .a file formats." File format details The ar format has never been standardized; modern archives are based on a common format with two main variants, BSD and System V (initially known as COFF, and used as well by GNU, ELF, and Windows.) Historically there have been other v ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Linker (computing)
In computing, a linker or link editor is a computer system program that takes one or more object files (generated by a compiler or an assembler) and combines them into a single executable file, library file, or another "object" file. A simpler version that writes its output directly to memory is called the ''loader'', though loading is typically considered a separate process. Overview Computer programs typically are composed of several parts or modules; these parts/modules do not need to be contained within a single object file, and in such cases refer to each other by means of symbols as addresses into other modules, which are mapped into memory addresses when linked for execution. While the process of linking is meant to ultimately combine these independent parts, there are many good reasons to develop those separately at the source-level. Among these reasons are the ease of organizing several smaller pieces over a monolithic whole and the ability to better define ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
GNU Linker
In computing, a linker or link editor is a computer system program that takes one or more object files (generated by a compiler or an assembler) and combines them into a single executable file, library file, or another "object" file. A simpler version that writes its output directly to memory is called the ''loader'', though loading is typically considered a separate process. Overview Computer programs typically are composed of several parts or modules; these parts/modules do not need to be contained within a single object file, and in such cases refer to each other by means of symbols as addresses into other modules, which are mapped into memory addresses when linked for execution. While the process of linking is meant to ultimately combine these independent parts, there are many good reasons to develop those separately at the source-level. Among these reasons are the ease of organizing several smaller pieces over a monolithic whole and the ability to better define the p ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ranlib
The archiver, also known simply as ar, is a Unix utility that maintains groups of files as a single archive file. Today, ar is generally used only to create and update static library files that the link editor or linker uses and for generating .deb packages for the Debian family; it can be used to create archives for any purpose, but has been largely replaced by tar for purposes other than static libraries. An implementation of ar is included as one of the GNU Binutils. In the Linux Standard Base (LSB), ar has been deprecated and is expected to disappear in a future release of that standard. The rationale provided was that "the LSB does not include software development utilities nor does it specify .o and .a file formats." File format details The ar format has never been standardized; modern archives are based on a common format with two main variants, BSD and System V (initially known as COFF, and used as well by GNU, ELF, and Windows.) Historically there have been other v ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
GNU Assembler
The GNU Assembler, commonly known as gas or as, is the assembler developed by the GNU Project. It is the default back-end of GCC. It is used to assemble the GNU operating system and the Linux kernel, and various other software. It is a part of the GNU Binutils package. The GAS executable is named , the standard name for a Unix assembler. GAS is cross-platform, and both runs on and assembles for a number of different computer architectures. GAS is free software released under the GNU General Public License v3. History The first version of GAS was released in 1986-1987. It was written by Dean Elsner, and supported the VAX architecture. General syntax GAS supports a general syntax that works for all of the supported architectures. The general syntax includes assembler directives and a method for commenting. The default syntax is AT&T syntax. Directives GAS uses assembler directives (also known as pseudo ops), which are keywords beginning with a period that behave similarly to ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Gprof
Gprof is a performance analysis tool for Unix applications. It used a hybrid of instrumentation and samplingSusan L. Graham, Peter B. Kessler, and Marshall K. Mckusick''gprof: a Call Graph Execution Profiler''// Proceedings of the SIGPLAN '82 Symposium on Compiler Construction, SIGPLAN Notices, Vol. 17, No 6, pp. 120-126; doi: 10.1145/800230.806987 and was created as an extended version of the older "prof" tool. Unlike prof, gprof is capable of limited call graph collecting and printing. History GPROF was originally written by a group led by Susan L. Graham at the University of California, Berkeley for Berkeley Unix (4.2BSD). Another implementation was written as part of the GNU project for GNU Binutils in 1988 by Jay Fenlason. Implementation Instrumentation code is automatically inserted into the program code during compilation (for example, by using the '-pg' option of the gcc compiler), to gather caller-function data. A call to the monitor function 'mcount' is inserted ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Name Mangling
In compiler construction, name mangling (also called name decoration) is a technique used to solve various problems caused by the need to resolve unique names for programming entities in many modern programming languages. It provides a way of encoding additional information in the name of a function, structure, class or another datatype in order to pass more semantic information from the compiler to the linker. The need for name mangling arises where the language allows different entities to be named with the same identifier as long as they occupy a different namespace (typically defined by a module, class, or explicit ''namespace'' directive) or have different signatures (such as in function overloading). It is required in these use cases because each signature might require different, specialized calling convention in the machine code. Any object code produced by compilers is usually linked with other pieces of object code (produced by the same or another compiler) by a type ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Executable And Linkable Format
In computing, the Executable and Linkable FormatTool Interface Standard (TIS) Portable Formats SpecificationVersion 1.1'' (October 1993) (ELF, formerly named Extensible Linking Format), is a common standard file format for executable files, object code, shared libraries, and core dumps. First published in the specification for the application binary interface (ABI) of the Unix operating system version named System V Release 4 (SVR4), and later in the Tool Interface Standard,Tool Interface Standard (TIS) Executable and Linking Format (ELF) SpecificationVersion 1.2'' (May 1995) it was quickly accepted among different vendors of Unix systems. In 1999, it was chosen as the standard binary file format for Unix and Unix-like systems on x86 processors by the 86open project. By design, the ELF format is flexible, extensible, and cross-platform. For instance, it supports different endiannesses and address sizes so it does not exclude any particular central processing unit (CPU) o ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
NetWare Loadable Module
A NetWare Loadable Module (NLM) is a loadable kernel module (a binary code module) that can be loaded into Novell's NetWare operating system. NLMs can implement hardware drivers, server functions (e.g. clustering), applications (e.g. GroupWise), system libraries or utilities. NLMs were supported beginning with the Intel 80386-based NetWare version 3.x. Prior versions of NetWare had a monolithic kernel, and significant hardware or functionality changes required re-linking the kernel from object modules. Due to stability issues with early third-party NLMs, they never became popular for server application programming, with few exceptions like antivirus programs, backup programs and certain database products. Functionality Upon loading, a NLM requests resources, such as memory and process threads, from the NetWare kernel. The NetWare kernel tracks such requests, and can identify memory and other resources assigned to a specific NLM. NLMs may auto-load other NLMs upon which ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Dynamic-link Library
Dynamic-link library (DLL) is Microsoft's implementation of the shared library concept in the Microsoft Windows and OS/2 operating systems. These libraries usually have the file extension DLL, OCX (for libraries containing ActiveX controls), or DRV (for legacy system drivers). The file formats for DLLs are the same as for Windows EXE files – that is, Portable Executable (PE) for 32-bit and 64-bit Windows, and New Executable (NE) for 16-bit Windows. As with EXEs, DLLs can contain code, data, and resources, in any combination. Data files with the same file format as a DLL, but with different file extensions and possibly containing only resource sections, can be called ''resource DLLs''. Examples of such DLLs include ''icon libraries'', sometimes having the extension ICL, and font files, having the extensions FON and FOT. Background The first versions of Microsoft Windows ran programs together in a single address space. Every program was meant to co-operate by yield ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
