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3.2.2.9 Reading relocations

Reading a coff relocation table is done in the following stages:

• Read the entire coff relocation table into memory.

• Process each relocation in turn; first swap it from the external to the internal form.

• Turn the symbol referenced in the relocation's symbol index into a pointer into the canonical symbol table. This table is the same as the one returned by a call to bfd_canonicalize_symtab. The back end will call that routine and save the result if a canonicalization hasn't been done.

• The reloc index is turned into a pointer to a howto structure, in a back end specific way. For instance, the 386 and 960 use the r_type to directly produce an index into a howto table vector; the 88k subtracts a number from the r_type field and creates an addend field.

@section ELF backends

BFD support for ELF formats is being worked on. Currently, the best supported back ends are for sparc and i386 (running svr4 or Solaris 2).

Documentation of the internals of the support code still needs to be written. The code is changing quickly enough that we haven't bothered yet.