Eric W. Biederman wrote:

Ok.  If that is all this may be a difference that makes no difference.
binutils has a bad habit of looking at sections (which are fully
optional) instead of segments on ET_EXEC and ET_DYN objects.  Only
ET_REL objects (.o files) are required to have sections.
  

The Xen domain loader will have to be changed to deal with that, which
isn't too much of a problem.

My main concern is the randomness of it, and whether it will fail in
some more harmful way on other versions of binutils.

So I recommend for testing write a 100 line program that includes
elf.h and reads out the note segment.  If all is well we can split
this code out.
  

The Xen readnotes utility is essentially that.  I'll hack it.

    J