[RFC] Symbol meta-information ELF extension

[H.J. Lu]

On Tue, Feb 18, 2020 at 5:47 AM Jozef Lawrynowicz
<jozef.l@mittosystems.com> wrote:
>
> 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.

syminfo is a very useful ELF extension.  My question is if binutils supports
syminfo, can it be extended to meet your need?


-- 
H.J.