My Own Private Binary: An Idiosyncratic Introduction to Linux Kernel Modules

My Own Private Binary An Idiosyncratic Introduction to Linux Kernel Modules How This Began Several years ago, I spent a serious chunk of time figuring out how to make really teensy ELF executable files. I started down this path because I was annoyed that all of my programs, no matter how short they were, never got smaller than 4k or so. I felt that was excessive, for C, and so I started looking at what ELF files contained, and how much of that actually needed to be there. (And then, after a while, how much of it was supposed to be there but could be ripped out anyway.) Anyway, I eventually managed to shrink an executable down to 45 bytes, and I was able to demonstrate that that was the smallest possible size an ELF executable could be and still run, under x86 Linux at least. I wrote up my findings, and some people found it interesting, and I got some positive feedback. A couple of people naturally pointed out that a shell script that did the same thing was much shorter than 45 byte ... Read full article.