ELF Symbol table

I’ve recently been doing some hacking (for food). I need to modify some object files (.o) generated by GCC before they’re passed to linker. (Using elfutils)

I thought I was doing everything right, but ld (GNU linker) insisted on crashing with segmentation fault. Finally, eu-elflint told me what was wrong – I was unaware of the ELF requirement that LOCAL symbols must come before GLOBAL symbols in a symtab (symbol table), and that sh_info is the boundary between LOCAL and GLOBAL symbols.

Many thanks to authors of elfutils, especially for their eu-elflint!

Tags: assembly, dev, GCC, Linux, opensource

Do What The Fuck You Want To Public License

WTFPL stands for “Do What The Fuck You Want To Public License”. It is like GPL or BSD license or any other public license you may have heard of, but has no restrictions, allowing you to “do what the fuck you want to.”

            DO WHAT THE FUCK YOU WANT TO PUBLIC LICENSE
                    Version 2, December 2004

  0. You just DO WHAT THE FUCK YOU WANT TO.

This is NOT joking. You can find software licensed under WTFPL in almost all major Linux distributions. The best known one may be the ASCII-art library libcaca, which is used by the well-known player mplayer. (In Gentoo you can find the text of the license at /usr/portage/licenses/WTFPL-2.)

You may want to ask if there is any difference from WTFPL to public domain. The authors explain that the definition of public domain varies from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, and it is unclear in some countries whether works can be in public domain unless its authors have been dead for 70 years, but it is absolutely clear in most countries you have the right to choose a license for your works.

[Unlike other posts licensed under Creative Commons, this post is licensed under the Do What The Fuck You Want To Public License.]

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

Tags: opensource