Possibility of loading/executing ELF files on OSX

StackOverflow https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2574912

  •  24-09-2019
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Question

I'm just curious as to the possibility of loading and executing elf files on OSX. I know the standard executable format is MACHO, but NASM is unable to generate debug information for MACHO objects (and I am required to use NASM). I imagine its a long shot, but I don't suppose I can use ELF files. I can build them with NASM, but I can't seem to even link them with LD.

Was it helpful?

Solution

The author of the best OS X internals book has some code showing how you'd write a kernel extension to handle another executable file format here. He gives two examples: running running Google Native Client (NaCl) ELF applications and PDP-11 apps with Apout.

I'm not sure how mature this software is. It currently supports Leopard and better.

OTHER TIPS

There's now an 'object converter' program that says it can convert ELF files to MACHO files, plus several other conversions for executable and object/loader files. See http://agner.org/optimize/#objconv for more information. Haven't tried it but there's extensive documentation available.

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