[RFC] Symbol meta-information ELF extension

[Jozef Lawrynowicz]

On Tue, 18 Feb 2020 04:58:02 -0800
"H.J. Lu" <hjl.tools@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Tue, Feb 18, 2020 at 2:26 AM Jozef Lawrynowicz
> <jozef.l@mittosystems.com> wrote:
> >
> > Hi,
> >
> > I've been working with Texas Instruments to develop an ELF extension which
> > allows additional information about symbols ("symbol meta-information") to
> > be stored in ELF files, in a section called .symtab_meta.
> >
> > The aim of symbol meta-information is to provide a extensible format for
> > propagating additional information about symbols from the source code through to
> > the link stage.
> >
> > I hope I can get some feedback on this proposal, and its current implementation,
> > from the upstream community so I can make any adjustments required for the
> > eventual upstreaming of this feature.  
> 
> Have you looked at Solaris syminfo section
> 
> https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E26502_01/html/E26507/chapter7-17.html
> 
> Can you extend it to do what you want?
> 

It looks like there is only some minimal support for the Syminfo section in
Binutils. The support is only there so that readelf can dump information about
the Syminfo section from an object file.

There's no implementation to enable the creation of a Syminfo section with
user-specified flags for certain symbols, nor are there any hooks into any
other Binutils programs, so I can't see any advantage to try and leverage that
existing functionality. 

Thanks,
Jozef