BFD support for ELF formats is being worked on. Currently, the best supported back ends are for sparc and i386 (running svr4 or Solaris 2).
Documentation of the internals of the support code still needs to be written. The code is changing quickly enough that we haven't bothered yet.
bfd_elf_find_sectionSynopsis
struct elf_internal_shdr *bfd_elf_find_section (bfd *abfd, char *name);
Description
Helper functions for GDB to locate the string tables.
Since BFD hides string tables from callers, GDB needs to use an
internal hook to find them. Sun's .stabstr, in particular,
isn't even pointed to by the .stab section, so ordinary
mechanisms wouldn't work to find it, even if we had some.