edhelind is an ELF file viewer tool. It provides a graphical user interface to view the internals of an Executable and Linkable Format file, the files used on a number of operating systems for their executable programs and shared libraries.
This is a useful tool for developers who need to examine the contents of their binaries, for casual users who are curious about "what's under the hood" of their computer, and for anyone in general who just wants to see the inside of a binary program without memorizing hard-to-find de facto standards documents.
edhelind can be used to view ELF executable binaries, dynamic sharted objects
(.so files), object files (.o files), and core dump files.
There are a number of tools for viewing ELF files that are in widespread use. The goal of edhelind was to provide a simple-to-use tool, portable to a number of popular development hosts, that could be used to view the ELF files for any arbitrary target regardless of target OS or CPU.
To that end, edhelind was developed against the following requirements.
- standalone definitions of ELF structure (no reliance on host-provided elf.h)
- no reliance on host libraries
- builds and runs on Microsoft Windows, Mac OS, and POSIXish systems like Linux
In order to satisfy those requirements, the only dependencies are the Qt framework for the GUI and the C++17 standard library for non-GUI stuff.
To build edhelind you will need the following installed in your build environment (minimum version specified or later).
On Linux: GCC 9, CMake 5.3, Qt core and widgets 5.5 or
later.
On Mac OS: LLVM 10, CMake 5.3, Qt Core and Widgets 5.5
On Windows: MSVC 2017, CMake 5.3, Qt Core and Widgets 5.5
On Linux you can just check out the sources and build with the following snippet.
$ git clone https://github.com/bregma/edhelind.git
$ cd edhelind
$ mkdir build && cd build
$ cmake ..
$ cmake --build .
Similar recipes can be used on Mac OS or Microsoft Windows, depending on your preferences.
Edhelind is divided into two parts: libedhel containing all the goodness that
opens, reads, and interprets ELF files, and edhelind itself, which is a
Qt-based GUI application that display the ELF file by using libedhel. The
library depends only on the C++ standard library and could be used to create
command-line tools with no extra dependencies.
An elf file is strictly a sequence of bytes: those bytes may represent
big-endian or little-endian words, and the structures may be interpreted using
32-bit or 64-bit layouts depending on the target system. libedhel literally treats
the underlying ELF file as a sequence of bytes (using C++'s std::byte type). It
determines word endianness and structure layouts by reading the first few bytes
of the ELF file and then relies on that interpretation when retrieving
information on demand.
There are a large number of ABI-, OS- and CPU-specific data that can be stored in an ELF file. The intention is to be able to configure various interpretive personalities to match the target.
The phrase "edhel ind" is a Sindarin phrase that translates roughly into English as "the innermost thoughts of an Elf." This is a play on the Extensible Linking Format, or ELF, being a homonym for J. R. R. Tolkein's Elves, a species of homonid for which he invented several languages.
A quick search of the internet shows more than a handful of projects called some variation of "ELF Viewer" so a simple, functional English name is out of the question. Reaching out to a Sindarin transation of several useful phrases related to the inner workings of elves (there are not a large lexicon of Elvish terms for anatomical structures), I came up with "edhel ind," which can be mushed together into a pronouncable word, hence edhelind. It may not be valid Sindarin and may irk some hardcore LotR filk but really, it's just an arbitrary name to uniquely identify a software program. Don't take made-up stuff so seriously.
edhelind is licensed under the GNU General Public License (version 3 or later) GPLv3.
The Catch2 test framework is licensed under the Boost Software License 1.0 BSL-1.0.
The Qt library is licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public License (version 3) LGPLv3.