[Caml-list] Does ocaml bytecodes linked in custom mode violate ELF std?

[Stefano Zacchiroli <zack@cs.unibo.it>]

I received a third part opinion (i.e. not a camlers) from Robert
Bihlmeyer (cc: in this mail, so please keep he in the cc: list) about
the ocaml bytecode executable linked in custom mode.

I report his opinion below, in his opinion that kind of executables
violate the ELF standard.

> After some careful analysis of mldvi I have come to the conclusion
> that this file violates the ELF standard. Specifically it seems to
> contain additional data that is not mentioned in any one of the ELF
> indices. It's no wonder that most of the GNU binutils will silently
> drop this additional data (strip being the one in question, but a
> no-op "objcopy mldvi mldvi2" will also remove it). I think binutils
> are doing the right thing here.
> 
> What the ocaml compiler should do is not just tag data onto the end of
> the file but put it into a proper ELF section. Either an existing one
> (e.g. ".data") or a new one (e.g. "bytecode"). Using the BFD library
> that should not be that hard, and it's true to the extensible spirit
> of ELF.

Who wants to answer to these observations?

TIA,
Cheers.

-- 
Stefano "Zack" Zacchiroli <zack@cs.unibo.it> ICQ# 33538863
Home Page: http://www.cs.unibo.it/~zacchiro
Undergraduate student of Computer Science @ University of Bologna, Italy
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