What's the replacement for REBASE.EXE?

Question

I have a need to rebase the group of DLL files that I install with my program, because it\'s a 32-bit program and the address space is just too fragmented right now. Also t

Answer 1

editbin.exe comes with VS2010 and has a /REBASE option.

C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\VC>editbin
Microsoft (R) COFF/PE Editor Version 10.00.40219.01
Copyright (C) Microsoft Corporation.  All rights reserved.

usage: EDITBIN [options] [files]

   options:

      /ALLOWBIND[:NO]
      /ALLOWISOLATION[:NO]
      /BIND[:PATH=path]
      /DYNAMICBASE[:NO]
      /ERRORREPORT:{NONE|PROMPT|QUEUE|SEND}
      /HEAP:reserve[,commit]
      /LARGEADDRESSAWARE[:NO]
      /NOLOGO
      /NXCOMPAT[:NO]
      /REBASE[:[BASE=address][,BASEFILE][,DOWN]]
      /RELEASE
      /SECTION:name[=newname][,[[!]{CDEIKOMPRSUW}][A{1248PTSX}]]
      /STACK:reserve[,commit]
      /SUBSYSTEM:{BOOT_APPLICATION|CONSOLE|EFI_APPLICATION|
                  EFI_BOOT_SERVICE_DRIVER|EFI_ROM|EFI_RUNTIME_DRIVER|
                  NATIVE|POSIX|WINDOWS|WINDOWSCE}[,#[.##]]
      /SWAPRUN:{[!]CD|[!]NET}
      /TSAWARE[:NO]
      /VERSION:#[.#]

And as Mark points out you'll want to turn off ASLR, which you can do by using /DYNAMICBASE:no

Answer 2

The reason Rebase.exe is deprecated is that it's not as useful as it used to be. Starting with Windows Vista, Microsoft implemented Address Space Layout Randomization which moves the system DLLs around every time you load them, and optionally the user DLLs as well.

If you're counting on rebasing to generate a large contiguous address space, you're going to be disappointed.

Answer 3

Not to mention the use of "REBASE.EXE -b 0x58000000 -e 0x10000 -c coffbase.txt *.dll" against a set of files, simply to generate the COFFBASE file.
In other words not because you intend to actually rebase your files now, but because you want an accurate COFFBASE.TXT,
so that they will /already/ be built with a specific and non-conflicting base address every time they are built.