I have implemented some aspects of an elf parser in Windows til getting the symbol table information and the symbol related information. Now I want to go ahead and know more about linking and loading which I believe has to do with parsing the program headers in the elf file.
Till now the elf format specification was very helpful, but I find it difficult to understand and relate to relocation information, linking and loading into virtual memory.
Can anyone suggest a good reference or documents? Is Linkers & Loaders by John R. Levine the book to start with? My requirement is at present limited to elf file formats.
Linkers & Loaders by John R. Levine is definitely a good resource to get started. It goes into the high level operation of a linker, agnostic to a specific object file format.
However, when it comes down to the nitty gritty details of actually implementing a ELF linker/loader, there really isn’t any better documentation than the ELF standard. This is rather unfortunate because the ELF standard is quite terse and can be ambiguous.