Incorporating and accessing binary data into a C program

The other day I needed to incorporate a large blob of binary data in a C program. One simple way is to use xxd, for example, on the binary data in file "blob", one can do:

xxd --include blob 

 unsigned char blob[] = {  
  0xc8, 0xe5, 0x54, 0xee, 0x8f, 0xd7, 0x9f, 0x18, 0x9a, 0x63, 0x87, 0xbb,  
  0x12, 0xe4, 0x04, 0x0f, 0xa7, 0xb6, 0x16, 0xd0, 0x70, 0x06, 0xbc, 0x57,  
  0x4b, 0xaf, 0xae, 0xa2, 0xf2, 0x6b, 0xf4, 0xc6, 0xb1, 0xaa, 0x93, 0xf2,  
  0x12, 0x39, 0x19, 0xee, 0x7c, 0x59, 0x03, 0x81, 0xae, 0xd3, 0x28, 0x89,  
  0x05, 0x7c, 0x4e, 0x8b, 0xe5, 0x98, 0x35, 0xe8, 0xab, 0x2c, 0x7b, 0xd7,  
  0xf9, 0x2e, 0xba, 0x01, 0xd4, 0xd9, 0x2e, 0x86, 0xb8, 0xef, 0x41, 0xf8,  
  0x8e, 0x10, 0x36, 0x46, 0x82, 0xc4, 0x38, 0x17, 0x2e, 0x1c, 0xc9, 0x1f,  
  0x3d, 0x1c, 0x51, 0x0b, 0xc9, 0x5f, 0xa7, 0xa4, 0xdc, 0x95, 0x35, 0xaa,  
  0xdb, 0x51, 0xf6, 0x75, 0x52, 0xc3, 0x4e, 0x92, 0x27, 0x01, 0x69, 0x4c,  
  0xc1, 0xf0, 0x70, 0x32, 0xf2, 0xb1, 0x87, 0x69, 0xb4, 0xf3, 0x7f, 0x3b,  
  0x53, 0xfd, 0xc9, 0xd7, 0x8b, 0xc3, 0x08, 0x8f  
 };  
 unsigned int blob_len = 128;  

..and redirecting the output from xxd into a C source and compiling this simple and easy to do.

However, for large binary blobs, the C source can be huge, so an alternative way is to use the linker ld as follows:

ld -s -r -b binary -o blob.o blob  

...and this generates the blob.o object code. To reference the data in a program one needs to determine the symbol names of the start, end and perhaps the length too. One can use objdump to find this as follows:

 objdump -t blob.o  
 blob.o:   file format elf64-x86-64  
 SYMBOL TABLE:  
 0000000000000000 l  d .data        0000000000000000 .data  
 0000000000000080 g    .data        0000000000000000 _binary_blob_end  
 0000000000000000 g    .data        0000000000000000 _binary_blob_start  
 0000000000000080 g    *ABS*        0000000000000000 _binary_blob_size  

To access the data in C, use something like the following:

 cat test.c  
 
 #include <stdio.h>  
 int main(void)  
 {  
         extern void *_binary_blob_start, *_binary_blob_end;  
         void *start = &_binary_blob_start,  
            *end = &_binary_blob_end;  
         printf("Data: %p..%p (%zu bytes)\n",   
                 start, end, end - start);  
         return 0;  
 }          

...and link and run as follows:

 gcc test.c blob.o -o test  
 ./test   
 Data: 0x601038..0x6010b8 (128 bytes)  

So for large blobs, I personally favour using ld to do the hard work for me since I don't need another tool (such as xxd) and it removes the need to convert a blob into C and then compile this.