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BFD trys to maintain as much symbol information as it can when
it moves information from file to file. BFD passes information
to applications though the asymbol
structure. When the
application requests the symbol table, BFD reads the table in
the native form and translates parts of it into the internal
format. To maintain more than the infomation passed to
applications some targets keep some information ’behind the
sceans’, in a structure only the particular back end knows
about. For example, the coff back end keeps the original
symbol table structure as well as the canonical structure when
a BFD is read in. On output, the coff back end can reconstruct
the output symbol table so that no information is lost, even
information unique to coff which BFD doesn’t know or
understand. If a coff symbol table was read, but was written
through an a.out back end, all the coff specific information
would be lost. The symbol table of a BFD
is not necessarily read in until a canonicalize request is
made. Then the BFD back end fills in a table provided by the
application with pointers to the canonical information. To
output symbols, the application provides BFD with a table of
pointers to pointers to asymbol
s. This allows applications
like the linker to output a symbol as read, since the ’behind
the sceens’ information will be still available.
1.1 Reading Symbols | ||
1.2 Writing Symbols | ||
1.3 typedef asymbol | ||
1.4 Symbol Handling Functions |
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There are two stages to reading a symbol table from a BFD; allocating storage, and the actual reading process. This is an excerpt from an appliction which reads the symbol table:
unsigned int storage_needed; asymbol **symbol_table; unsigned int number_of_symbols; unsigned int i; storage_needed = get_symtab_upper_bound (abfd); if (storage_needed == 0) { return ; } symbol_table = (asymbol **) bfd_xmalloc (storage_needed); ... number_of_symbols = bfd_canonicalize_symtab (abfd, symbol_table); for (i = 0; i < number_of_symbols; i++) { process_symbol (symbol_table[i]); }
All storage for the symbols themselves is in an obstack
connected to the BFD, and is freed when the BFD is closed.
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Writing of a symbol table is automatic when a BFD open for
writing is closed. The application attaches a vector of
pointers to pointers to symbols to the BFD being written, and
fills in the symbol count. The close and cleanup code reads
through the table provided and performs all the necessary
operations. The outputing code must always be provided with an
’owned’ symbol; one which has come from another BFD, or one
which has been created using bfd_make_empty_symbol
. An
example showing the creation of a symbol table with only one element:
#include "bfd.h" main() { bfd *abfd; asymbol *ptrs[2]; asymbol *new; abfd = bfd_openw("foo","a.out-sunos-big"); bfd_set_format(abfd, bfd_object); new = bfd_make_empty_symbol(abfd); new->name = "dummy_symbol"; new->section = bfd_make_section_old_way(abfd, ".text"); new->flags = BSF_GLOBAL; new->value = 0x12345; ptrs[0] = new; ptrs[1] = (asymbol *)0; bfd_set_symtab(abfd, ptrs, 1); bfd_close(abfd); } ./makesym nm foo 00012345 A dummy_symbol
Many formats cannot represent arbitary symbol information; for
instance the a.out
object format does not allow an
arbitary number of sections. A symbol pointing to a section
which is not one of .text
, .data
or .bss
cannot
be described.
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An asymbol
has the form:
.typedef struct symbol_cache_entry
{ /* A pointer to the BFD which owns the symbol. This information is necessary so that a back end can work out what additional (invisible to the application writer) information is carried with the symbol. */ struct _bfd *the_bfd; /* The text of the symbol. The name is left alone, and not copied - the application may not alter it. */ CONST char *name; /* The value of the symbol.*/ symvalue value; /* Attributes of a symbol: */ #define BSF_NO_FLAGS 0x00 /* The symbol has local scope; <<static>> in <<C>>. The value is the offset into the section of the data. */ #define BSF_LOCAL 0x01 /* The symbol has global scope; initialized data in <<C>>. The value is the offset into the section of the data. */ #define BSF_GLOBAL 0x02 /* Obsolete */ #define BSF_IMPORT 0x04 /* The symbol has global scope, and is exported. The value is the offset into the section of the data. */ #define BSF_EXPORT 0x08 /* The symbol is undefined. <<extern>> in <<C>>. The value has no meaning. */ #define BSF_UNDEFINED_OBS 0x10 /* The symbol is common, initialized to zero; default in <<C>>. The value is the size of the object in bytes. */ #define BSF_FORT_COMM_OBS 0x20 /* A normal C symbol would be one of: <<BSF_LOCAL>>, <<BSF_FORT_COMM>>, <<BSF_UNDEFINED>> or <<BSF_EXPORT|BSD_GLOBAL>> */ /* The symbol is a debugging record. The value has an arbitary meaning. */ #define BSF_DEBUGGING 0x40 /* Used by the linker */ #define BSF_KEEP 0x10000 #define BSF_KEEP_G 0x80000 /* Unused */ #define BSF_WEAK 0x100000 #define BSF_CTOR 0x200000 /* This symbol was created to point to a section */ #define BSF_SECTION_SYM 0x400000 /* The symbol used to be a common symbol, but now it is allocated. */ #define BSF_OLD_COMMON 0x800000 /* The default value for common data. */ #define BFD_FORT_COMM_DEFAULT_VALUE 0 /* In some files the type of a symbol sometimes alters its location in an output file - ie in coff a <<ISFCN>> symbol which is also <<C_EXT>> symbol appears where it was declared and not at the end of a section. This bit is set by the target BFD part to convey this information. */ #define BSF_NOT_AT_END 0x40000 /* Signal that the symbol is the label of constructor section. */ #define BSF_CONSTRUCTOR 0x1000000 /* Signal that the symbol is a warning symbol. If the symbol is a warning symbol, then the value field (I know this is tacky) will point to the asymbol which when referenced will cause the warning. */ #define BSF_WARNING 0x2000000 /* Signal that the symbol is indirect. The value of the symbol is a pointer to an undefined asymbol which contains the name to use instead. */ #define BSF_INDIRECT 0x4000000 flagword flags; /* A pointer to the section to which this symbol is relative. This will always be non NULL, there are special sections for undefined and absolute symbols */ struct sec *section; /* Back end special data. This is being phased out in favour of making this a union. */ PTR udata; } asymbol;
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get_symtab_upper_bound
Description
Returns the number of bytes required in a vector of pointers
to asymbols
for all the symbols in the supplied BFD,
including a terminal NULL pointer. If there are no symbols in
the BFD, then 0 is returned.
#define get_symtab_upper_bound(abfd) \ BFD_SEND (abfd, _get_symtab_upper_bound, (abfd))
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bfd_canonicalize_symtab
Description
Supplied a BFD and a pointer to an uninitialized vector of
pointers. This reads in the symbols from the BFD, and fills in
the table with pointers to the symbols, and a trailing NULL.
The routine returns the actual number of symbol pointers not
including the NULL.
#define bfd_canonicalize_symtab(abfd, location) \ BFD_SEND (abfd, _bfd_canonicalize_symtab,\ (abfd, location))
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bfd_set_symtab
Description
Provided a table of pointers to symbols and a count, writes to
the output BFD the symbols when closed.
Synopsis
boolean bfd_set_symtab (bfd *, asymbol **, unsigned int );
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bfd_print_symbol_vandf
Description
Prints the value and flags of the symbol supplied to the stream file.
Synopsis
void bfd_print_symbol_vandf(PTR file, asymbol *symbol);
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bfd_make_empty_symbol
Description
This function creates a new asymbol
structure for the BFD,
and returns a pointer to it.
This routine is necessary, since each back end has private
information surrounding the asymbol
. Building your own
asymbol
and pointing to it will not create the private
information, and will cause problems later on.
#define bfd_make_empty_symbol(abfd) \ BFD_SEND (abfd, _bfd_make_empty_symbol, (abfd))
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bfd_decode_symclass
Description
Return a lower-case character corresponding to the symbol
class of symbol.
Synopsis
int bfd_decode_symclass(asymbol *symbol);
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