Program and section headers are different things only because ELF makes it so, and this is a bad design. The same mostly goes for having both physical and virt

Program and section headers are different things only because ELF makes it so, and this is a bad design. The same mostly goes for having both physical and virtual addresses. Has there ever even existed a loader that would generate page tables according to that? There should have been one kind of address, and possibly header flags to indicate allowable MMU states. If there is no such bug, then you can stop wasting that byte at the beginning of the string tables.