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Aligning regions to page boundaries

You can produce an ELF file with each execution region starting at a page boundary.

The linker provides the following built-in functions to help create load and execution regions on page boundaries:

  • AlignExpr, to specify an address expression.
  • GetPageSize, to obtain the page size for use in AlignExpr. If you use GetPageSize, you must also use the --paged linker command-line option.
  • SizeOfHeaders(), to return the size of the ELF header and Program Header table.

Note

  • Alignment on an execution region causes both the load address and execution address to be aligned.
  • The default page size is 0x8000. To change the page size, specify the --pagesize linker command-line option.

To produce an ELF file with each execution region starting on a new page, and with code starting on the next page boundary after the header information:

LR1 0x0 + SizeOfHeaders()
{
    ER_RO +0
    {
        *(+RO)
    }
    ER_RW AlignExpr(+0, GetPageSize())
    {
        *(+RW)
    }
    ER_ZI AlignExpr(+0, GetPageSize())
    {
        *(+ZI)
    }
}

If you set up your ELF file in this way, then you can memory-map it onto an operating system in such a way that:

  • RO and RW data can be given different memory protections, because they are placed in separate pages.
  • The load address everything expects to run at is related to its offset in the ELF file by specifying SizeOfHeaders() for the first load region.
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