Very likely larger amounts of binary data linked in your program should better be "read only data", and hence be put in the ".rodata" section. From the objcopy

Very likely larger amounts of binary data linked in your program should better be "read only data", and hence be put in the ".rodata" section. From the objcopy manpage: objcopy -I binary -O <output_format> -B <architecture> \ --rename-section .data=.rodata,alloc,load,readonly,data,contents \ <input_binary_file> <output_object_file> I had made a short demo of this technique quite a few years ago, but regretably hadn't included the .rodata thing: https://github.com/vogelchr/objcopy_to_carray https://github.com/vogelchr/objcopy_to_carray, so if you want to check this out with minimal effort, have fun with it ;-). [optiplex /home/chris/objcopy_to_carray (master)] $ make cc -Wall -Wextra -ggdb -Os -c -o testme.o testme.c objcopy -I binary -O elf64-x86-64 -B i386:x86-64 \ --rename-section .data=.rodata,alloc,load,readonly,data,contents \ /etc/passwd passwd.o || (rm -f passwd.o ; exit 1) cc testme.o passwd.o -o testme [optiplex /home/chris/objcopy_to_carray (master)] $ ./testme Dumping /etc/passwd, in memory @0x4006a4, size is 1701. root:x:0:0:root:/root:/bin/bash bin:x:1:1:bin:/bin:/bin/false daemon:x:2:2:daemon:/sbin:/bin/false mail:x:8:12:mail:/var/spool/mail:/bin/false