A couple of times recently I've found myself wanting to create ELF files with custom program headers. This post explains what that means, why you might want it, why there's a practical difficulty in doing so using a standard linker, and my slightly hacky way of solving it. Program headers are metadata within ELF files. They describe a contiguous chunk of the file's address space. There are several different kinds of program header, of which the most critical is LOAD, signifying that the relev...
