Ian Campbell wrote:

It has been suggested to me that the notes segment should have flags 0
(i.e. not readable) since it is only used by the loader and is not used
at runtime. For now I went with a readable segment since that is what
the i386 patch uses.
  

Note that the PT_NOTEs segment is aliased to a part of one of the 
PT_LOADs - ie, it points into the data segment.  So making it -rwx would 
either be ignored, or also require putting the bits into a new PT_LOAD 
segment with 0 permissions, which is pretty pointless.  I made it R_E 
just so there was no permissions conflict, though the _E part could 
probably go.

    J