RFH: Annotating ELF binaries

[Joel Sherrill]

Hi

Great idea! I recall Ada toolsets annotating objects
long ago so there was a traceable record of how they
were compiled, what source file version, etc. That
all required closed source tools though.

Chris Johns from RTEMS has been investigating
add ELF annotations to RTEMS and Newlib to indicate which
standards a particular method adheres to. We think this
would assist in evaluating the conformance of a program
to various standards. It hasn't reached the point of
making a public proposal but the underlying idea of
leveraging ELF annotation is similar.

I have cc'ed him so he is aware of this. Perhaps there
is some synergy.

--joel

On 11/4/2016 10:02 AM, Nick Clifton wrote:
> Hello Everyone,
>
>   We (the tools team at Red Hat) are working on a project to add
>   annotations to ELF binaries, so that we can answer various questions
>   about them.  We have set up a wiki page about the project here:
>
> https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Toolchain/Watermark#Markup_for_ELF_objects
>
>   We would very much like this to be something more than just an
>   internal project, and so we are reaching out to you for your opinions,
>   suggestions and advice.  If you are interested in being able answer
>   questions such as 'how was this function compiled ?' or 'is this
>   library compatible with this application ?' then please take a minute
>   to have a look at the proposal.
>
>   Thanks very much.
>
> Cheers
>   Nick Clifton
>

-- 
Joel Sherrill, Ph.D.             Director of Research & Development
joel.sherrill@OARcorp.com        On-Line Applications Research
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