dpatch

(work in progress) Experimental dynamic patching system.

Quickstart

You'll need to build dpatch and a target program to get started.

The target program must have its symbols exported as dynamic symbols, which is a known limitation of dpatch. The dpatch repository comes with several demonstration programs pre-configured for building and using.

# Configure build scripts into `./build`.
$ cmake -B build .

# Build the configured targets in ./build`.
$ cmake --build build

# Run the newly-built `dpatch`.
$ ./build/dpatch ./build/test/hello_world
Hello, world!

# (Optional) Install `dpatch` onto your system.
$ cmake --build build -t install
$ dpatch /usr/local/dpatch/demo/hello_world
Hello, world!

Building, installing, and packaging

dpatch is built with CMake.

Building

The basic build commands are the standard CMake commands:

# Configure build scripts in `/build` for the platform default build tool.
# This will probably be UNIX Makefiles on most Linux systems.
$ cmake -B build

# Build all targets in `./build` using the platform-default build tools.
$ cmake --build build

At this point, you could run dpatch directly from the build output directory:

$ ./build/dpatch /path/to/target/program

Installing

CMake is configured with install targets for CMake.

You can install dpatch directly onto your system using $ cmake --build build -t install. Installing dpatch will allow you to run it directly from your system paths:

$ dpatch /path/to/target/program

Packaging

dpatch can be installed to a custom output directory to support self-packaging, or automatically packaged by CMake's cpack subsystem.

CPack

dpatch can generate its own packages using CMake's cpack system. CPack will generate a (not very) reasonable default package format for your platform. On Unix-style systems, this is likely to be a self extracting archive wrapped in a shell script.

Build a package by invoking:

$ cmake --build build -t package

You can change the package format by invoking cpack directly:

$ cpack --config build/CPackConfig.cmake -G <PackageGenerator>

View cpack --help for a list of package generator formats available for your platform.

Self-packaging

dpatch's install target respects the standard DESTDIR environment variable to install dpatch to a custom path. This can be used to generate binary packages as you see fit.