🚀 go-pugleaf

weber@rhrk.uni-kl.de (Christoph Weber-Fahr [KIT]) writes:

>Somebody who should know it told me this group were basically for flaming.
>Nevertheless I'll try with a technical question... :-)

It definitely seems to invite flames, but I doubt that was the
intention at all.

>For a special purpose I need to execute (ELF-)binaries which already
>reside in memory. Now some guy told me something along the lines of 
>'Have a look at the GNU stuff - I seem to remember that they have
>a tool/library for this task'. 

Well, there are some libraries and utilities that could be
altered to do what I think you're trying to do.  The main
question is what OS you're running under.

The BFD library (as part of the binutils development version) is
already being used for this kind of thing (but from an open file
descriptor) in the GNU HURD (not in the snapshots yet).  However,
the Mach microkernel has a bunch of features that make this
much easier to do than in the UNIX model.  The BFD library still
has the limitation of wanting to work from a file descriptor.

I don't know about GDB having this capability.  It uses other
function calls to load in a process in a separate address
space from a file, using the normal OS mechanisms, as far
as I'm aware.

Basically, since the exec capability of most UNIX-like OSes only
works from a file name, you'd have to construct the executable
image in memory, or as a short cut, you could try to write it
to a file (say, via a memory-mapping mechanism), then run
the normal exec on it.

Erich

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