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The ELF Tool Chain Project

About This Project

We develop BSD licensed implementations of essential development tools and libraries for building and analyzing ELF based program images.

Quick Links

• SF.Net project overview.
• Mailing Lists.
• Reference Manuals.
• Source Tree.
• Wiki Index.
• Commit log search, by FreshBSD.org

News

• 2016/02/18: Release 0.7.1 is now available for download.
• 2012/09/24: Release 0.6.1 is now available for download.
• 2011/11/16: Release 0.5.1 is now available for download.

Supported Operating Systems

Our source code is known to work on the following operating systems:

• DragonFlyBSD
• FreeBSD
• Minix3
• NetBSD
• OpenBSD
• Ubuntu GNU/Linux

Why is this project useful?

This project provides tools for program development. Notably:

• Our code is structured as a set of tools written using a set of well-documented libraries. These libraries are useful for creating custom tools for manipulating ELF programs and shared libraries.
• We also provide out-of-the-box implementations of common program development tools built over these libraries.
• We strive to keep to the traditional BSD standard for quality in code and documentation. We strive to 'Do The Right Thing'.
• Our code is licensed under a liberal license.
• As a project, we strive to make our decisions in a transparent and inclusive manner.

Users

Elftoolchain code is usually imported by operating system projects into their respective source trees. Operating system projects known to be using Elftoolchain code include:

• FreeBSD
• NetBSD
• OpenBSD
• RTEMS

Caveats

• Our code is relatively new, it has not seen the level of adoption that the GNU binutils code base has.
• Our code base only deals with ELF objects; other object file formats are not well supported.
• Our development team is small, comprising of volunteers.

How to help

• Please join the mailing list; let us know how you are using our code and how your experience has been.
• Please review our code and documentation; let us know if you find a bug.
• Pick up a ticket from our list of open tickets, and send in fixes.
• We need help in setting up build and test automation for the OSes we support, please see [BuildAutomation].

Implementation Status

Tool	Description	Development Status	Owner	Repository Location	Comments
Native or POSIX-mandated Tools
ar	Archive manager.	released	kaiwang27	ar/
as	Assembler.	planning	jkoshy	as/	(see libmc, isa)
brandelf	Set/read the ELF brand for an executable.	released	kaiwang27	brandelf/
c++filt	Translated encoded symbols.	released	kaiwang27	c++filt/
elfdump	Diagnostic tool.	released	kaiwang27	elfdump/
elflint	Diagnostic tool.	planning			See ticket #586.
isa	Instruction set analyser	in development	jkoshy	isa/
ld	Link editor.	alpha	kaiwang27	ld/
nm	List symbols in an ELF object.	released	hglee	nm/
mcs	Manage comment sections in ELF objects.	released	kaiwang27	elfcopy/
ranlib	Generate an archive symbol table.	released	kaiwang27	ar/
size	List ELF object sizes.	released	samarunraj	size/
strings	Extract printable strings from an ELF object.	released	samarunraj	strings/
strip	Discard information from objects.	released	kaiwang27	elfcopy/
GNU Tools
addr2line	Debug tool.	released	kaiwang27	addr2line/
elfcopy	Copy and translate between object formats.	released	kaiwang27	elfcopy/
findtextrel	Find undesired text relocations.	released	kaiwang27	findtextrel/
objdump	Display object information.	planning			Merge with elfdump?
readelf	Display ELF information.	released	kaiwang27	readelf/
Libraries and API sets
libdwarf	A library for parsing DWARF debug information.	released	kaiwang27	libdwarf/	"pfgshield-freebsd" (email suppressed) notes that early versions of SGI's libdwarf library were released under a non-GPL'ed license.
libelf	A library for reading and writing ELF objects.	released	jkoshy	libelf/
libelftc	Common code used by tools.	released	jkoshy	libelftc/
libmc	Machine/assembly code manipulation.	planning	jkoshy		For use in an optimizing linker, debugger and assember, program instrumentation tools, and the like.
libpe	A library for reading and writing Portable Executable™objects	alpha	kaiwang27	libpe/
libtask	A simple task management facility	planning	jkoshy		For use in tools that need to sequence potentially parallel computations.
Test Suites
ar	The test suite for the `ar` utility.	released	kaiwang27	test/ar/
elfcopy	The test suite for `elfcopy` utility.	released	kaiwang27	test/elfcopy/
elfdump	The test suite for `elfdump` utility.	released	kaiwang27	test/elfdump/
libdwarf	The test suite for the libdwarf library.	released	kaiwang27	test/libdwarf/
libelf	The test suite for the libelf library.	released	jkoshy	test/libelf/
libelftc	The test suite for the libelftc library.	alpha	jkoshy	test/libelftc/
nm	The test suite for the nm utility.	released		test/nm/
size	The test suite for the size utility.	planning			See ticket #9.
strings	The test suite for the `strings` utility.	planning			See ticket #10.
Documentation
Manual Pages	Reference documentation.	released	jkoshy	multiple locations	Each utility and library API has a manual entry.
libelf by Example	Tutorial introduction to programming with libelf.	released	jkoshy	documentation/libelf-by-example
libdwarf by Example	An introduction to DWARF and libdwarf.	planning	jkoshy		TBD

Getting Started

• Building From Source
• Porting Notes

Project History

This work was originally a part of the FreeBSD Project; it has been moved to SourceForge.Net to encourage wider participation from the open-source developer community.

Related Reading

• The DWARF standard.
• The ERESI project---The ERESI Reverse Engineering Software Interface.
• The Libunwind project.
• The Linux Standard Base specification (v3.1).
• The NASM and YASM open source assemblers.
• The New Jersey Machine Code Toolkit.
• The Knit utility.
• The Solaris Linker and Libraries Guide.
• The PyDevTools project allows rapid prototyping of program development tools in Python.