- RDOFF
RDOFF, the Relocatable Dynamic Object File Format, was born from the need for NASM developers to test the integrity of
NASM 's object file output capabilities. It is based heavily on the internal structure of NASM,cite web|url=http://nasm.sourceforge.net/doc/nasmdoc6.html|title=NASM Manual Ch. 6|date=|accessdate=2008-06-27|author=] essentially consisting of a header containing aserialization of the output driver function calls followed by an array of sections containing executable code or data. Tools for using the format, including a linker and loader, are included in the NASM distribution.History
Until version 0.90 of NASM was released in October
1996 , NASM only supported output of flat-format executable files (e.g.MS-DOS COM file s). In version 0.90,Simon Tatham added support for an object-file output interface, along with support for DOS .OBJ files for 16-bit code only.cite web|url=http://nasm.cvs.sourceforge.net/nasm/nasm/CHANGES?revision=1.48&view=markup|title=NASM CVS|date=2008-06-08|accessdate=2008-06-27|author=]NASM thus lacked a 32-bit object format. To address this lack, and as an exercise to learn the object-file interface, developer Julian Hall put together the first version of RDOFF, which was released in NASM version 0.91.cite web|url=http://nasm.cvs.sourceforge.net/nasm/nasm/CHANGES?revision=1.48&view=markup|title=NASM CVS|date=2008-06-08|accessdate=2008-06-27|author=]
Since this initial version, there has been one major update to the RDOFF format, which added a record-length indicator on each header record, [cite web|url=http://nasm.cvs.sourceforge.net/nasm/nasm/rdoff/doc/v1-v2.txt?revision=1.1&view=markup|title=V1-V2.txt|date=2002-12-4|accessdate=2008-06-27|author=] allowing programs to skip over records whose format they do not recognise, and support for multiple segments; RDOFF1 only supported three segments: "text", "data" and "bss" (containing uninitialized data).
References
See also
*
Assembly language
*File Formats
*Object File Projects based on RDOFF
*
RadiOS Operating System Project
*WDOSX DOS extender External links
* [http://nasm.cvs.sourceforge.net/nasm/nasm/CHANGES?revision=1.48&view=markup NASM version history]
* [http://nasm.cvs.sourceforge.net/nasm/nasm/rdoff/doc/v1-v2.txt?revision=1.1&view=markup Differences between RDOFF1 and RDOFF2]
* [http://sourceforge.net/projects/nasm NASM (SourceForge)]
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