Among ELFs and DWARFs
summary
Examines ELF binaries to diagnose startup cost, resident memory and plugin load failures by reading symbol tables, relocations and sections rather than source. Shows tools and commands: nm/c++filt/readelf to list and demangle symbols, ldd/otool/dependency walker to emulate loader search, readelf/objdump to inspect PLT/GOT and relocations, elf-dissector to visualize rw-data. Demonstrates a real-world bug seen twice where PLT-generated function pointers break Qt signal/slot lookup and explains the fix: build everything with position independent code (-fPIC) and inspect relocations; shows GDB indexing giving 5–10x attach speedups.
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chapters (10)
- 0:00Introduction
- 2:08ELFs
- 5:05Linker
- 7:39Loading Errors
- 11:29Plugins
- 14:07Runtime Problems
- 17:41Safety Measures
- 19:30Memory Consumption
- 23:28GDB Index
- 24:11Questions
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