E.L.F Executable Loader

The E.L.F Executable Loader loads the executable file into memory page-by-page, using a request-paging mechanism - a page will only be loaded when it is needed. For simplicity, the loader runs only static executable files - which is not linked to shared / dynamic libraries.

📝 Table of Contents

• About
• Getting Started
• Usage
• Built Using
• Authors

🧐 About

The interface of the loader is presented in the header loader.h file. This has functions to initialize a loader (so_init loader) and execute a binary (so_execute)

• The so_init_loader function performs the library initialization. Within the function, the page fault action will be a routine for handling the SIGSEGV signal.
• The so_execute function performs the parsing of the binary specified in the path and executes the first entry point of the executable.

🏁 Getting Started

These instructions will get you a copy of the project up and running on your local machine for development and testing purposes.

Prerequisites

To use the loader.h library on your projects you must have:

• for UNIX based operating systems:
  • gcc - is a tool from the GNU Compiler Collection used to compile and link C programs

Installing

This is a step by step series of examples that tell you how to get a development env running.

• Linux:
  • start by updating the packages list

    sudo apt-get update

  • install the build-essential package(a bundle of packages including gcc, g++ and make) by typing:

    sudo apt-get install build-essential 

🔧 Running the tests

If you want to run the automated tests for Linux system you must follow the following steps:

• clone the repository by copping the following command in your terminal:

  git clone https://github.com/gabriel-rusu/E.L.F-Executable-Loader.git
  

• go into the project director and run the following command:

  make test

• the results of the tests will be in the newly created file result.out

🎈 Usage

If you want to use the libso_loader.so library in your projects then you must add the loader.h header in the desired source file and specify at the compile time the path to the libso_loader.so library.

• running the following command in the project director will generate the libso_loader.so:

  make build

⛏️ Built Using

• Visual Studio Code - code editor
• gcc - used to compile the library on my Linux machine

✍️ Authors

• @gabriel-rusu - implementation