I'm looking for a simple way to reorder the ELF file sections. I've got a sequence of custom sections that I would like all to be aligned in a certain order.
The only way I've found how to do it is to use a Linker script. However the documentation indicates that specifying a custom linker script overrides the default. The default linker script has a lot of content in it that I don't want to have to duplicate in my custom script just to get three sections always together in a certain order. It does not seem very flexible to hard code the linker behavior like that.
Why do I want to do this? I have a section of data that I need to know the run-time memory location of (beginning and end). So I've created two additional sections and put sentinel variables in them. I then want to use the memory locations of those variables to know the extent of the unknown section in memory.
.markerA
int markerA;
.targetSection
... Lots of variables ...
.markerB
int markerB;
In the above example, I would know that the data in .targetSection is between the address of markerA and markerB.
Is there another way to accomplish this? Are there libraries that would let me read in the currently executing ELF image and determine section location and size?