MiniDebugInfo support

Mark Wielaard mjw at redhat.com
Thu Nov 8 10:08:41 UTC 2012


On Wed, 2012-11-07 at 16:05 +0100, Martin Milata wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 06, 2012 at 18:50:27 +0100, Mark Wielaard wrote:
> > How standardized is this? Is it just for Fedora or do other distros
> > also use it? Is the support in GDB and RPM upstream or only in the
> > Fedora packages? Can it be seen as a standard GNU extension?
> 
> AFAIK no other distribution uses it. It is not in RPM upstream. I don't
> know if either is planned.

I am a little hesitant to add support for a feature that is not upstream
in any of the standard toolchain/distro tools, and apparently also not
used by any other distro than Fedora. Of course Fedora is often first,
but it would be good to get an idea who else is going to support this.
What is the reason upstream RPM and GDB haven't accepted this (yet)?

> As Jan mentioned, we mostly care about dwfl_module_addrsym. Maybe if
> there was possibility to indicate which symbol table to search, or
> indicate that we want to search all of them? I'm afraid I'm the last
> person on this mailing list with the knowledge to propose a proper
> solution:)

OK, dwfl_module_addrsym () uses a search over the symbols as returned by
dwfl_module_getsym (). So it might still make sense to just merge the
symbols from this mini-symtab with the available (dynsym) symbols for
dwfl_module_getsym () if we want to support this "transparently". I'll
take a closer look whether that is possible. As Jan pointed out it is
slightly more difficult than I thought at first since you have to merge
the dynsym and mini-symtab symbols. And currently dwfl_module_getsymtab
() gets either symtab or dynsym if that isn't available, but not both
(since symtab normally contains everything from dynsym anyway).

Cheers,

Mark


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