prior art?

[Colin McCormack]

Hi,

We're writing a persistent store ( http://field.medicine.adelaide.edu.au ) and 
are looking at improving its functionality by assuming (or subverting) some of 
the functions of libdl.so.

One of the things libdl.so does (under Linux) is permit symbols defined on the 
primary executable to override those defined in shared libs.  I intend to use 
this to redirect some relocations into our coldstore.

This entails generation of symbols, and I will certainly be using bfd to 
handle that.

As I was reading the bfd.info, a strange thought occurred to me:  since bfd 
will write-out symbol tables, and since (as far as I know) symbol tables and 
the rest of the executable are mmap()ed into the address space, can bfd modify 
the symbol table of a running executable by opening it and just ... rewriting 
it?

Colin.