by Ciro Santilli (@cirosantilli, 36)
Then come the most important symbols:
Num:    Value          Size Type    Bind   Vis      Ndx Name
  4: 0000000000000000     0 NOTYPE  LOCAL  DEFAULT    1 hello_world
  5: 000000000000000d     0 NOTYPE  LOCAL  DEFAULT  ABS hello_world_len
  6: 0000000000000000     0 NOTYPE  GLOBAL DEFAULT    2 _start
hello_world string is in the .data section (index 1). It's value is 0: it points to the first byte of that section.
_start is marked with GLOBAL visibility since we wrote:
global _start
in NASM. This is necessary since it must be seen as the entry point. Unlike in C, by default NASM labels are local.
hello_world_len points to the special st_shndx == SHN_ABS == 0xF1FF.
0xF1FF is chosen so as to not conflict with other sections.
st_value == 0xD == 13 which is the value we have stored there on the assembly: the length of the string Hello World!.
This means that relocation will not affect this value: it is a constant.
This is small optimization that our assembler does for us and which has ELF support.
If we had used the address of hello_world_len anywhere, the assembler would not have been able to mark it as SHN_ABS, and the linker would have extra relocation work on it later.

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