Re: Help required on COFF version dynamic loader

Antonio Camurri:
> We planned to use a dynamic loader (such as GNU dld), but our version
> (dld3.2.3) is not working on COFF format object files.


I don't know of a newer dld. Many of the GNU binary tools (like gas, ld,
size, et. al.) are being rewritten to use the Binary File Description
(BFD) library. The BFD library allows programs to manipulate object files
in a format independent way (so that the code in ld does not need to know
if it is reading/writing DBX or COFF style object files).


I have thought about changing DLD to use BFD so DLD could work on any
machine that BFD supports. But, alas, not enough time.


Usually a COFF linker supports "i-files" which are an ld(1) language for
specifying how to link objects together. Some people have used this style
COFF linker to approximate dynamic linking by keeping an i-file with the
addresses of all symbols loaded and invoking the linker with a .o and this
i-file to bind the .o at an address, and then reading the resulting a.out
into memory and merging the newly loaded symbols with the old i-file for a
new i-file ready for the next dynamic load.


Brian Beuning


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