Has this ever happened to you?

You want to look at a JSON file in your terminal, so you pipe it into jq so you can look at it with colors and stuff.

...oh hey cool bear. No warm-up today huh.

Sure, fine, okay, I'll read the darn man page for jq... okay it takes a "filter" and then some files. And the filter we want is.. which, just like files, means "the current thing":

Welcome back to the eighteenth and final part of "Making our own executable packer".

In the last article, we had a lot of fun. We already had a "packer" executable, minipak, which joined together stage1 (a launcher), and a compressed version of whichever executable we wanted to pack.

What we added, was a whole bunch of abstractions to parse ELF headers using , which we used from to be able to launch the guest executable from memory, instead of writing it to a file and using on it.

Welcome back!

In the last article, we did foundational work on minipak, our ELF packer.

It is now able to receive command-line arguments, environment variables, and auxiliary vectors. It can parse those command-line arguments into a set of options. It can make an ELF file smaller using the LZ4 compression algorithm, and pack it together with stage1, our launcher.

And we're back!

In the last article, we thanked our old code and bade it adieu, for it did not spark joy. And then we made a new, solid foundation, on which we planned to actually make an executable packer.

As part of this endeavor, we've made a crate called encore, which only depends on libcore, and provides some of the things libstd would give us, but which we cannot have, because we do not want to rely on a libc.

You're still here! Fantastic.

I have good news, and bad news. The good news is, we're actually going to make an executable packer now!

I know right? No lie, we're actually really going to start working on the final product from this point onwards.

Good morning, and welcome back to "how many executables can we run with our custom dynamic loader before things get really out of control".

In Part 13, we "implemented" thread-local storage. I'm using scare quotes because, well, we spent most of the article blabbering about Addressing Memory Through The Ages, And Other Fun Tidbits.

we

In this series, we'll attempt to understand how Linux executables are organized, how they are executed, and how to make a program that takes an executable fresh off the linker and compresses it - just because we can.

I write a ton of articles about rust. And in those articles, the main focus is about writing Rust code that compiles. Once it compiles, well, we're basically in the clear! Especially if it compiles to a single executable, that's made up entirely of Rust code.

That works great for short tutorials, or one-off explorations.

Unfortunately, "in the real world", our code often has to share the stage with other code. And Rust is great at that. Compiling Go code to a static library, for example, is relatively finnicky. It insists on being built with GCC (and no other compiler), and linked with GNU ld ().

not