NAME¶

hex2 - The trivially bootstrappable linker that is designed to be introspectable by humans

SYNOPSIS¶

hex2 --architecture ARCHITECTURE --base-address ADDRESS --file FILE [--output FILE [--non-executable]]

DESCRIPTION¶

hex2 is designed to allow humans to write elf and other binary files by hand in a format that allows comments and ease of understanding.

At its core is read 2 hex characters add them together and output a single byte. You can override this and use binary or octal input if you so desire, using the --octal or --binary option.
If no output file is specified the output will be send to standard out. By default the file will be executable unless the option: --non-executable is also passed.

The supported ARCHITECTURES are as follows: knight-native, knight-posix, x86, amd64, armv7l and aarch64. If you fail to specify an architecture, the default of knight-native will be used.
The base address for which the binary is to be loaded into memory and thus the relative and absolute pointers should be based, is passed via --base-address if it is not provided the default value of ZERO will be assumed.

hex2 also support labels in the :LABEL format and relative and absolute pointers to those labels in 8, 16, 24 or 32bit sizes. !LABEL, @LABEL, ~LABEL and %LABEL for 8, 16, 24 and 32bit relative addresses respectively and $LABEL and &LABEL for 16 and 32bit absolute addresses respectively. Should you wish to specify the bit and byte encoding of the addresses to match your target --big-endian and --little-endian

On architectures that require word alignment the < and ^ characters have a special meaning; particularly pad to word and use word base address calculation rather than standard byte based address calculation; generally seen in the form: ^~LABEL EB for calls in ARM

EXAMPLES¶

Typically, hex2 will be called in scripts used in bootstrapping
# hex2 -f ELF-armv7l.hex2 -f cc.hex2 --little-endian --architecture armv7l --base-address 0x10000 -o cc

COMPATIBILITY¶

hex2 is compatible with all Turing complete machines; even the ones that try to be Turing complete -1

AUTHORS¶

Jeremiah Orians <Jeremiah@pdp10.guru>
Jan (janneke) Nieuwenhuizen <janneke@gnu.org>

COPYRIGHT¶

Copyright 2016-2019 Jeremiah Orians <Jeremiah@pdp10.guru>
Copyright 2017 Jan Nieuwenhuizen <janneke@gnu.org>
License GPLv3+.

SEE ALSO¶

M1(1), blood-elf(1), kaem(1), syscalls(2)