More fun with linking

August 21, 2020

I managed to resolve my problem from yesterday, though I’m still not satisfied that I understand why it now works, so it’s possible that it just works by accident. Evidently there’s still a lot I need to learn about linking.

A new problem I ran into is working out the entry point of the user program from the kernel linked into the same ELF (binary). This is necessary for the kernel to start a user-level thread, whose initial program counter will be this entry point. My original plan was to use the _start symbol from the user program (renamed using objcopy), which after relocation will contain the address I want. This doesn’t appear to “just work” the way I expected, so there’s clearly even more I still need to learn about linking!