Editing Netwide Assembler (section)

=== RDOFF ===
Relocatable Dynamic Object File Format (RDOFF) is used by developers to test the integrity of NASM's object file output abilities. It is based heavily on the internal structure of NASM,<ref name = "manual">{{cite web|url=http://nasm.sourceforge.net/doc/nasmdoc6.html|title=NASM Manual Ch. 6|access-date=2008-06-27}}</ref> essentially consisting of a header containing a [[serialization]] of the output driver function calls followed by an array of sections containing executable code or data.  Tools for using the format, including a linker and loader, are included in the NASM distribution.

Until version 0.90 was released in October 1996, NASM supported output of only flat-format executable files (e.g., [[DOS]] [[COM file]]s). In version 0.90, [[Simon Tatham]] added support for an object-file output interface, and for DOS .OBJ files for 16-bit code only.<ref name="CVS">{{cite web|url=http://nasm.cvs.sourceforge.net/nasm/nasm/CHANGES?revision=1.48&view=markup|title=NASM CVS|date=2008-06-08|access-date=2008-06-27}}</ref>

NASM thus lacked a 32-bit object format.  To address this lack, and as an exercise to learn the object-file interface, developer Julian Hall put together the first version of RDOFF, which was released in NASM version 0.91.<ref name="CVS"/>

Since this initial version, there has been one major update to the RDOFF format, which added a record-length indicator on each header record,<ref>{{cite web|url=http://nasm.cvs.sourceforge.net/nasm/nasm/rdoff/doc/v1-v2.txt?revision=1.1&view=markup|title=V1-V2.txt|date=2002-12-04|access-date=2008-06-27}}</ref> allowing programs to skip over records whose format they do not recognise, and support for multiple segments; RDOFF1 only supported three segments: ''text'', ''data'' and ''bss'' (containing uninitialized data).<ref name = "manual"/>

The RDOFF format is strongly deprecated and has been disabled starting in NASM 2.15.04.{{r|RDOFF}}