18

I'm just curious as to the possibility of loading and executing elf files on OSX. I know the standard executable format is MACHO, but NASM is unable to generate debug information for MACHO objects (and I am required to use NASM). I imagine its a long shot, but I don't suppose I can use ELF files. I can build them with NASM, but I can't seem to even link them with LD.

Cœur
  • 37,241
  • 25
  • 195
  • 267
Daniel Brotherston
  • 1,954
  • 4
  • 18
  • 28

2 Answers2

14

The author of the best OS X internals book has some code showing how you'd write a kernel extension to handle another executable file format here. He gives two examples: running running Google Native Client (NaCl) ELF applications and PDP-11 apps with Apout.

I'm not sure how mature this software is. It currently supports Leopard and better.

Glorfindel
  • 21,988
  • 13
  • 81
  • 109
stuntmouse
  • 302
  • 3
  • 2
6

There's now an 'object converter' program that says it can convert ELF files to MACHO files, plus several other conversions for executable and object/loader files. See http://agner.org/optimize/#objconv for more information. Haven't tried it but there's extensive documentation available.

JESii
  • 4,678
  • 2
  • 39
  • 44