D034 - A finished module has no section headers

Status: decided, on evidence.

The linked file carries .rela.dyn and .rela.plt as sections, and the vendor segment carries copies described by DT_SCE_RELA and DT_SCE_JMPREL. Two descriptions of the same relocations, in two places, reachable two ways - and a loader is free to find them either way.

Two separate emulators were observed reading relocations from somewhere neither tag points at, logging entries whose "type" was four bytes of ASCII out of a string table. That is not harmless noise: a loader that mis-reads a relocation does not fail to apply it, it applies it - writing a bad value at a bad address inside the loaded image.

mkmodule now zeroes the section header table. Nothing is deleted, only the index; the bytes stay where they are, described by the program headers, which is all a loader reads. The garbage relocations stopped immediately.

It cost something. obscene-tool imports read .dynsym and could no longer see a module at all. It now reads the vendor tables the way a loader does, which is what it should have done from the start - a module is the shape it is, and a tool that can only inspect the intermediate form cannot inspect a real one either.