Linker Plugins User Guide

Linker plugin functionality is an elegant and easy-to-use solution to add user-defined behavior to ELD.

This guide contains all that you need to know about linker plugins, and how to effectively write one yourself.

Overview

• Implemented as a C++ class.

• Facilitates user-defined behavior to crucial parts of the link process.

• Provides finer control over the output image layout than a linker script.

• Allows inspecting symbols, chunks, relocation, section mapping, input and output sections.

• Allows adding and modifying section mapping rules, relocations, chunk attributes, and symbols.

• Plugins can communicate with the linker as well as with each other.

• Easy traceability of plugins using --trace=plugin option.

• PluginADT provides wrappers for many common linker data types.

• 1. Linker Plugins
  • 1.1. Introduction
  • 1.2. Elements of the link process
  • 1.3. Plugin Interface Types
  • 1.4. Linker Wrapper
  • 1.5. Running a linker plugin
  • 1.6. User Plugin Workflow
  • 1.7. How the linker runs plugin
  • 1.8. Tracing plugins
  • 1.9. Link States
  • 1.10. Deep Dive into the Plugin Interfaces
• 2. Linker Plugin Examples
  • 2.1. Exclude symbols from the output image symbol table
  • 2.2. Add Linker Script Rules
  • 2.3. Reading INI Files Functionality
  • 2.4. Modify Relocations
  • 2.5. Section Rule-Matching
  • 2.6. Change Symbol Value to Another Symbol
• 3. Linker Plugin API Usage and Reference
  • 3.1. Linker Wrapper
  • 3.2. Plugin Abstract Data Types
  • 3.3. LinkerPluginConfig
  • 3.4. Utility Data Structures
  • 3.5. Plugin Diagnostic Framework