Inside Macintosh: Mac OS Runtime Architectures /

Chapter 8 - PEF Structure

Overview

The CFM-based architecture stores information in PEF containers, which are simply storage blocks that contain PEF information. A PEF container can be stored in a file, a resource, or section of memory. The Code Fragment Manager can transparently prepare any of these forms.

A PEF container has four major parts as shown in Figure 8-1.

Figure 8-1 Structure of a PEF container

The four parts are as follows:

• The container header contains information about the container itself, such as the runtime architecture that it was created for, version information, and so on.
• Each section header contains information (size, alignment, and so on) about the various sections in the PEF container. Both code and data can be stored in sections.
• The section name table contains the names of each section.
• The section contents area contains the contents of the sections described by the section headers.

PEF containers typically include one or more sections of executable code, one or more sections of initialized data, and a loader section.

Each part is described in more detail in the sections that follow.

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11 MARCH 1997

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