What is the difference between elfutils and binutils ?

As per wikipedia, elfutils is mentioned as, “Ulrich Drepper wrote elfutils, to replace GNU Binutils, purely for Linux and with support only for ELF and DWARF”

elfutils is a Red Hat project.

There is substantial overlap between elfutils (eu-addr2line, eu-elflint, eu-findtextrel, eu-nm, eu-readelf, eu-size, eu-strip, etc.) and binutils (addr2line, nm, readelf, size, strip, objdump, etc.)

Ulrich Drepper who authored elfutils has mentioned the differences as below,

  • The tools in elfutils compared with binutils are
    • smaller
    • faster (several times, usually)
    • less buggy,
    • more featureful
  • there are several tools which are not available in binutils which are in (wide) use
    – there are several more tools which use the elfutils libraries (systemtap, frysk, …)

[ Also READ – How to compile elfutils for x86 ? ]

References –
Wikipedia

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