Elftoolchain

The Elftoolchain project offers liberally-licensed tools and libraries for program development.  The project has been in existence since 2008.

Home page: https://elftoolchain.sourceforge.io/.

News / Recent Posts

• Elftoolchain API changes - Jan 7, 2025
• New ELFTC(3) APIs - Jan 2, 2025
• Upcoming Opensource Work - Apr 28, 2022
• Elftoolchain v0.7.1 - Feb 20, 2016
• New release: ELF Toolchain v0.6.1 - Sep 25, 2012

Downstream Uses

Base System Imports

Elftoolchain has been designed to be suitable for inclusion into the base systems of OS projects.  Examples of such uses include:

• FreeBSD: contrib/elftoolchain — most tools and libraries.

• Minix: external/bsd/elftoolchain — libelf and libdwarf.

• NetBSD: src/external/bsd/elftoolchain — libelf and libdwarf.

• OpenBSD: src/lib/libelf - only libelf.

• RTEMS: rtems-tools/rtemstoolkit/elftoolchain — libelf, libdwarf and libelftc.

Other Imports

A few open-source projects that have imported Elftoolchain code into their source trees:

• DynamoRIO: a runtime code manipulation system — in ext/drsyms.

• Elastic’s EBPF: Elastic’s version of EBPF — in contrib/elftoolchain.

• ravynOS: A FreeBSD-based operating system inspired by Mac OS X ™ — in contrib/elftoolchain.

As Installable Packages

Elftoolchain’s tools and libraries are also available as standalone packages:

• Via Pkgsrc: devel/elftoolchain.

• Via Macports: devel/elftoolchain.

Source Code

The project is hosted at SourceForge.Net.

Its source code can be checked out from: https://sourceforge.net/p/elftoolchain/code/HEAD/tree/trunk.

Documentation

Project Wiki

Please see https://elftoolchain.sourceforge.io/.

Articles

(Tutorial) Libelf by Example

This is a short introduction to libelf, a library for manipulating ELF objects.

It covers:

1. Getting started with libelf: obtaining a handle to an ELF object, establishing a working ELF version, and handling errors reported by libelf.

2. How ELF data structures are laid out in-memory and on disk, the notions of "file representation" and "memory representation", how to write applications that can handle non-native binaries.

3. ELF Segments and the ELF Program Header Table, retrieving the program header table from an ELF executable and the meaning of the fields of a program header table entry.

4. How data is stored inside ELF sections, the ELF Section Header Table, and how to traverse the sections in an ELF object.

5. How to create new ELF objects: the rules for ordering individual API calls, the default object layout implemented by libelf, and how to specify custom layouts.

6. ar archives: their structure, and how to read the contents of these archives using the APIs provided by libelf.

Download Links

• Libelf by Example (at Leanpub).

• Libelf by Example (at SourceForge).

Books

The ELF Handbook

Reference material for ELF.  Please see: A Handbook For ELF.