Once we disassembled the ELF to check the sections using “objdump” command, we can see the lines as “CONTENTS, ALLOC, LOAD, READONLY, CODE” along with sections.
Sections:
Idx Name Size VMA LMA File off Algn
1 .text 000031b8 00008018 00008018 00008018 2**3
CONTENTS, ALLOC, LOAD, READONLY, CODE
8 .data 00000844 0001b308 0001b308 0000b308 2**3
CONTENTS, ALLOC, LOAD, DATA
9 .bss 0000007c 0001bb4c 0001bb4c 0000bb4c 2**2
ALLOC
In this post, we describe the meaning of each of this. You can also check “How to check sections and its memory map of Binary / ELF using GDB ?” for getting sections details if you are actively debugging using GDB.
The meaning of each of this is as below,
- ALLOC – Section will have space allocated in the process when loaded. Set for all sections except those containing debug information.
- LOAD – Section will be loaded from the file into the child process memory. Set for pre-initialized code and data, clear for .bss sections.
- RELOC – Section needs to be relocated before loading.
- READONLY – Section cannot be modified by the child process.
- CODE – Section contains executable code only.
- DATA – Section contains data only (no executable code).
- ROM – Section will reside in ROM.
- CONSTRUCTOR – Section contains data for constructor/destructor lists.
- HAS_CONTENTS – Section is not empty.
- NEVER_LOAD – An instruction to the linker to not output the section.
- COFF_SHARED_LIBRARY – A notification to the linker that the section contains COFF shared library information.
- IS_COMMON – Section contains common symbols.
Reference : https://sourceware.org/gdb/onlinedocs/gdb/Files.html
