Selecting the Target System

This appendix describes how you can specify targets and architectures for the ELF utilities.

Note: The development tools automatically take care of this — you'll probably never need to worry about it.

You can specify three aspects of the target system to the utilities that work on ELF files, each in several ways:

target — the object file format
architecture — the type of CPU the target file is to run on
linker emulation (which applies to the linker only) — a “personality” that specifies default values for the target system.

In the following summaries, the lists of ways to specify values are in order of decreasing precedence; the ways listed first override those listed later.