I have grander plans but to nut out some details I threw together a basic elf loader this morning. I've only tested it on core 0,0 in a group and it wont handle multi-core elf files but it's still useful in it's current (incomplete) form.
The source drop is available here:
It includes a simple example that works on parallella-16 (at least). It's setup for compiling on-host.
The loader itself is simpler & faster than the srec loader and allows for symbolic resolution as demonstrated by the example. TBH i'm kind of baffled why the current sdk even includes an srec thing since elf is designed specifically to allow for minimal loader code. Last (and only) time i used srec was 20 years ago at uni ...
edit: I moved the location of the file.