jhj, Thanks. I personally like C over C++ [for a plethora of reasons] too, and also dbx over gdb. If you care to expand on what you like, you can always mention me, or drop an /msg or two, if it doesn't fit in #illumos .

Does anyone have an easy way of generating corrupt core files for testing a new elf note off hand? Or is just creating it manually likely the simplest path?

I don't have anything at hand but was curious if anyone else had built it and did a search for "elf file fuzzer" and found github.com/IOActive/Melkor_ELF_Fuzzer (amusingly, the author refers to malformed elf files as orcs)

it's 10 years old with 2 real commits so it may not be that complete or useful.

I'd forgotten about that. There is a fork at github.com/omniosorg/Melkor_ELF_Fuzzer which builds on illumos

I used it when I was making some changes to elfexec in the kernel

Yeah, in this case more so wanted to just edit the notes without having to deal with updating all the sections and lengths by hand.

I have run melkor a lot, and found a bunch of bugs (mostly in elfdump etc.)