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Re: ELF and DWARF tools ?

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"John R. Levine" wrote:

> I am working on a project which involves building a compiler toolchain for
> yet another architecture.  The obvious object format to use is ELF and
> DWARF, and I'm trying to figure out the least painful way to do that. ...

This isn't going to help much. I have plenty of coding scars to show for
re-implementing compiler elf/dwarf support from scratch. Most of
what I found comes from a number of issues.

1) Lack of comprehensive elf/dwarf documentation. There are several
documents out there that help but often critical details are missing.
This has several effects on tools that use elf / dwarf. I discovered that
debug tools that use elf/dwarf have the same problem and results in
in-compatibility between tools that generate elf/dwarf and those that
use these files.

2) Extensions to the elf/dwarf files to represent ISA or data types
specific issues have been a problem. Integer types are well handled
fixed point formats not so much.

elf/dwarf is surprisingly complex in ways that primarily designed
to save file space not as much of a goal in today's computing environment.

Keep detailed implementation notes on choices made to resolve
details, one thing that I didn't do but should have done. I resolved
issues on my initial implementation to make the intended debug tools
and the elf/dwarf files I was generating compatible but that in
the long term came back to bite me when I started to work on a
new tool set.

Walter..

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Thread

ELF and DWARF tools ? "John R. Levine" <johnl@iecc.com> - 2014-12-29 00:42 -0500
  Re: ELF and DWARF tools ? C Bergström <cbergstrom@pathscale.com> - 2014-12-29 13:22 +0700
  Re: ELF and DWARF tools ? Hans Aberg <haberg-news@telia.com> - 2014-12-29 10:38 +0100
  Re: ELF and DWARF tools ? Walter Banks <walter@bytecraft.com> - 2014-12-29 08:05 -0500
    Re: ELF and DWARF tools ? Charles Chester <cc.63dw@gmail.com> - 2014-12-30 18:18 -0500

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