[ANNOUNCE] mkelfImage 2.0

After a long and tedious grind I am pleased to announce version 2.0 of mkelfImage.
New features.
- One single binary
- Itanium support
- All of the code is in C.
- New and exciting easter eggs (err bugs can you find them before I do?...)

Available at: ftp://ftp.lnxi.com/pub/src/mkelfImage/mkelfImage-2.0.tar.gz

rpms can be built with rpm -ta mkelfImage-2.0.tar.gz
alien will make perfectly serviceable debs from those...

The decision to go with pure C is that it is both relatively portable,
and it reduces maintenance when I add a feature.  I tried perl and it
handles the interesting code only with the utmost protest.  Adding
checksums and other interesting pieces is much easier if it only needs
to be both coded in one language, and usually the C implementation is
much easier than the perl.  Plus C is fast :)

Have fun,

Eric

[ollie lho]

On Tue, 2003-01-14 at 08:19, Eric W. Biederman wrote:
> After a long and tedious grind I am pleased to announce version 2.0 of mkelfImage.
> New features.
> One single binary
> Itanium support
> All of the code is in C.
> New and exciting easter eggs (err bugs can you find them before I do?...)
>
> Available at: ftp://ftp.lnxi.com/pub/src/mkelfImage/mkelfImage-2.0.tar.gz
>
> rpms can be built with rpm -ta mkelfImage-2.0.tar.gz
> alien will make perfectly serviceable debs from those...
>
> The decision to go with pure C is that it is both relatively portable,
> and it reduces maintenance when I add a feature.  I tried perl and it
> handles the interesting code only with the utmost protest.  Adding
> checksums and other interesting pieces is much easier if it only needs
> to be both coded in one language, and usually the C implementation is
> much easier than the perl.  Plus C is fast :)

Eric,
    Something off topic, the elfImage made by mkelfImage 1.1x can 
not be recognized by 'objdump' but can be dumped by 'readelf'. Is there
any reason for this ? Is this fixed by ver. 2.0 ?

ollie lho  writes:
> Eric,
>    Something off topic, the elfImage made by mkelfImage 1.1x can 
> not be recognized by 'objdump' but can be dumped by 'readelf'. Is there
> any reason for this ?

Yes.  This is a bug in some versions of objdump.  On my current
system this bug does not occur.  It can be worked around by putting
in a dummy symbol table, but this increases the size by a few bytes.
Possibly a problem in an embedded situation.
> Is this fixed by ver. 2.0 ?

No.

And my version objdump which does not show the problem is:

eric@maxwell:~$ objdump --version
GNU objdump 2.13.90.0.10 20021010 Debian GNU/Linux
Copyright 2002 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
This program is free software; you may redistribute it under the terms of
the GNU General Public License.  This program has absolutely no
warranty.

Eric