lukem@wasabisystems.com ("Luke Mewburn") writes:
> On Fri, Aug 03, 2001 at 12:58:00PM +1000, matthew green wrote:
> > but certainly the solution that simply refuses to run correct programs 
> > because they don't have a tag is no good.  it makes it impossible (sans a
> > kernel rebuild) to run programs that are otherwise completely useful.
> 
> what's the feasibility of providing a tool which munges the program to
> set this .note ?

"Shouldn't be too hard," but nobody's done it AFAIK.  8-)

IIRC (it's been a while), to do it right you have to:

* expand the program header,

* add the note entry right up near the program header, hopefully in
the first page/block of the binary,

* move everything else "down a page" in the ELF file, to keep the load
offsets the same modulo page size.

I don't believe anybody's written a tool to do it, but again, it
shouldn't be too hard.



BTW, this would be useful for several reasons.  one of which is the
fact that for a long time we've documented but not really supported an
"emulation name" note which should be used to mark existing ELF
binaries to be run with a specific NetBSD emulation (to simplify
detection of emulation type, for hard-to-identify ELF binaries).

The form of that note can be found at:

	file:/home/cgd/proj/netbsd/htdocs/Documentation/kernel/elf-notes.html

AFAIK it's never actually been used, so if there's desire to change it
to have some different form that's probably fine...



cgd