The scripts in this repository calculate the checksum of the sections of elf-format files. The purpose is to check the consistency of executables and shared libraries.
In normal circumstances, you can use
ld --build-id=md5
or
gcc -Wl,--build-id=md5
to embed checksum into the elf files. Only in particular situations the scripts here fit your need.
It is important to make sure we have the same program as our software testers do. If not, we may waste time, discussing what a real bug is. Using the checksum of the program is one possible way to achieve this.
However, I ran into a situation where generated elf files have different checksum, with the same code and with the same build commands. The reason is that the build system insert source code paths into elf files. As a result, the elf files are slightly different (though they work the same way).
People use the md5 checksum of the whole file to decide two versions of elf files are identical. Unfortunately their method cannot apply in such a case. Therefore I write this script to generate only the checksum of the .text section of an elf file, where .text section is the machine instructions store. In such a way I can show that two elf files are consistent.