Q:

How are function sizes calculated by readelf

I am trying to understand how readelf utility calculates function size. I wrote a simple program
#include <stdio.h>

int main() {
    printf("Test!\n");
}

Now to check function size I used this (is this OK ? ):
readelf -sw a.out|sort -n -k 3,3|grep FUNC
which yielded:
 1: 0000000000000000     0 FUNC    GLOBAL DEFAULT  UND puts@GLIBC_2.2.5 (2)
 2: 0000000000000000     0 FUNC    GLOBAL DEFAULT  UND __libc_start_main@GLIBC_2.2.5 (2)
29: 0000000000400470     0 FUNC    LOCAL  DEFAULT   13 deregister_tm_clones
30: 00000000004004a0     0 FUNC    LOCAL  DEFAULT   13 register_tm_clones
31: 00000000004004e0     0 FUNC    LOCAL  DEFAULT   13 __do_global_dtors_aux
34: 0000000000400500     0 FUNC    LOCAL  DEFAULT   13 frame_dummy
48: 0000000000000000     0 FUNC    GLOBAL DEFAULT  UND puts@@GLIBC_2.2.5
50: 00000000004005b4     0 FUNC    GLOBAL DEFAULT   14 _fini
51: 0000000000000000     0 FUNC    GLOBAL DEFAULT  UND __libc_start_main@@GLIBC_
58: 0000000000400440     0 FUNC    GLOBAL DEFAULT   13 _start
64: 00000000004003e0     0 FUNC    GLOBAL DEFAULT   11 _init
45: 00000000004005b0     2 FUNC    GLOBAL DEFAULT   13 __libc_csu_fini
60: 000000000040052d    16 FUNC    GLOBAL DEFAULT   13 main
56: 0000000000400540   101 FUNC    GLOBAL DEFAULT   13 __libc_csu_init

Now if I check the main function's size, it shows 16. How did it arrive at that? Is that the stack size ?
Compiler used gcc version 4.8.5 (Ubuntu 4.8.5-2ubuntu1~14.04.1)
GNU readelf (GNU Binutils for Ubuntu) 2.24

A:

The size given by readelf is the size of the binary object; for main, that’s the sequence of machine instructions which implement your function. On my system, I see
57: 00000000004004d7    21 FUNC    GLOBAL DEFAULT   13 main

from readelf, which matches up nicely with the compiled code as shown by gcc -S or objdump -d:
0000000000000000 <main>:
   0:   55                      push   %rbp
   1:   48 89 e5                mov    %rsp,%rbp
   4:   bf 00 00 00 00          mov    $0x0,%edi
   9:   e8 00 00 00 00          callq  e <main+0xe>
   e:   b8 00 00 00 00          mov    $0x0,%eax
  13:   5d                      pop    %rbp
  14:   c3                      retq   

The 21 bytes are the bytes 55, 48, 89, e5 etc.

