toy ELF64 linker written in rust

resources used

• wikipedia overview
• elf32 abi specification
• elf64 abi specification
• linker blog post collection

Basic Linker Operation

At this point we already know enough to understand the basic steps used by every linker.

• Read the input object files. Determine the length and type of the contents. Read the symbols.
• Build a symbol table containing all the symbols, linking undefined symbols to their definitions.
• Decide where all the contents should go in the output executable file, which means deciding where they should go in memory when the program runs.
• Read the contents data and the relocations. Apply the relocations to the contents. Write the result to the output file.
• Optionally write out the complete symbol table with the final values of the symbols.