Program header table

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Program header table by Ciro Santilli 34 Updated 2024-12-15 +Created 1970-01-01
Only appears in the executable.
Contains information of how the executable should be put into the process virtual memory.
The executable is generated from object files by the linker. The main jobs that the linker does are:
  • determine which sections of the object files will go into which segments of the executable.
    In Binutils, this comes down to parsing a linker script, and dealing with a bunch of defaults.
    You can get the linker script used with ld --verbose, and set a custom one with ld -T.
  • do relocation according to the .rela.text section. This depends on how the multiple sections are put into memory.
readelf -l hello_world.out gives:
Elf file type is EXEC (Executable file)
Entry point 0x4000b0
There are 2 program headers, starting at offset 64

Program Headers:
  Type           Offset             VirtAddr           PhysAddr
                 FileSiz            MemSiz              Flags  Align
  LOAD           0x0000000000000000 0x0000000000400000 0x0000000000400000
                 0x00000000000000d7 0x00000000000000d7  R E    200000
  LOAD           0x00000000000000d8 0x00000000006000d8 0x00000000006000d8
                 0x000000000000000d 0x000000000000000d  RW     200000

 Section to Segment mapping:
  Segment Sections...
   00     .text
   01     .data
On the ELF header, e_phoff, e_phnum and e_phentsize told us that there are 2 program headers, which start at 0x40 and are 0x38 bytes long each, so they are:
00000040  01 00 00 00 05 00 00 00  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  |................|
00000050  00 00 40 00 00 00 00 00  00 00 40 00 00 00 00 00  |..@.......@.....|
00000060  d7 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  d7 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  |................|
00000070  00 00 20 00 00 00 00 00                           |.. .....        |
and:
00000070                           01 00 00 00 06 00 00 00  |        ........|
00000080  d8 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  d8 00 60 00 00 00 00 00  |..........`.....|
00000090  d8 00 60 00 00 00 00 00  0d 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  |..`.............|
000000a0  0d 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  00 00 20 00 00 00 00 00  |.......... .....|
Structure represented www.sco.com/developers/gabi/2003-12-17/ch5.pheader.html:
typedef struct {
    Elf64_Word  p_type;
    Elf64_Word  p_flags;
    Elf64_Off   p_offset;
    Elf64_Addr  p_vaddr;
    Elf64_Addr  p_paddr;
    Elf64_Xword p_filesz;
    Elf64_Xword p_memsz;
    Elf64_Xword p_align;
} Elf64_Phdr;
Breakdown of the first one:
  • 40 0: p_type = 01 00 00 00 = PT_LOAD: this is a regular segment that will get loaded in memory.
  • 40 4: p_flags = 05 00 00 00 = execute and read permissions. No write: we cannot modify the text segment. A classic way to do this in C is with string literals: stackoverflow.com/a/30662565/895245 This allows kernels to do certain optimizations, like sharing the segment amongst processes.
  • 40 8: p_offset = 8x 00 TODO: what is this? Standard says:
    This member gives the offset from the beginning of the file at which the first byte of the segment resides.
    But it looks like offsets from the beginning of segments, not file?
  • 50 0: p_vaddr = 00 00 40 00 00 00 00 00: initial virtual memory address to load this segment to
  • 50 8: p_paddr = 00 00 40 00 00 00 00 00: unspecified effect. Intended for systems in which physical addressing matters. TODO example?
  • 60 0: p_filesz = d7 00 00 00 00 00 00 00: size that the segment occupies in memory. If smaller than p_memsz, the OS fills it with zeroes to fit when loading the program. This is how BSS data is implemented to save space on executable files. i368 ABI says on PT_LOAD:
    The bytes from the file are mapped to the beginning of the memory segment. If the segment’s memory size (p_memsz) is larger than the file size (p_filesz), the ‘‘extra’’ bytes are defined to hold the value 0 and to follow the segment’s initialized area. The file size may not be larger than the memory size.
  • 60 8: p_memsz = d7 00 00 00 00 00 00 00: size that the segment occupies in memory
  • 70 0: p_align = 00 00 20 00 00 00 00 00: 0 or 1 mean no alignment required. TODO why is this required? Why not just use p_addr directly, and get that right? Docs also say:
    p_vaddr should equal p_offset, modulo p_align
The second segment (.data) is analogous. TODO: why use offset 0x0000d8 and address 0x00000000006000d8? Why not just use 0 and 0x00000000006000d8?
Then the:
 Section to Segment mapping:
section of the readelf tells us that:
  • 0 is the .text segment. Aha, so this is why it is executable, and not writable
  • 1 is the .data segment.
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