Les wrote:
On Sat, 2008-07-19 at 11:51 -0700, Michael Eager wrote:
Robert P. J. Day wrote:
a friend who's just getting into development on linux was reading
the gcc manual and ran across the variety of available debugging
formats here:
http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc-4.3.0/gcc/Debugging-Options.html
and asked me, out of all those formats, which was the "best" one to
start working with.
i suggested he'd be best off getting familiar with the DWARF 2
format, since fedora already comes with a yum-installable "dwarves"
package containing various DWARF-related examination utilities.
that seemed like an easy answer at the time, but is there a better
choice? i realize stabs is still common but, in terms of being
technically advanced, is DWARF 2 the most informative and most useful
of the formats? thanks.
Well, DWARF version 3 was released a few years ago. :-)
DWARF is an extensible, block structured debugging format. It has
a significant user community which is involved in upgrading and
extending it. Other formats, such as stabs or coff debug, are either
not block structured, difficult to extend, limited to specific
architectures, poorly documented, antiquated, or moribund.
DWARF is the default debugging format for most GCC compilers,
including those on Linux on x86 and PowerPC. Linux migrated away
from stabs some time ago.
You can find an Introduction to DWARF article which I wrote a
couple years ago on the DWARF website: http://dwarfstd.org
--
Michael Eager Chair, DWARF Standards Committee eager@xxxxxxxxxxxx
1960 Park Blvd., Palo Alto, CA 94306 650-325-8077
Thank you Michael, For a very well written paper. I had dug into COFF
before, but had stumbled upon some of its limitations. DWARF seems very
well thought out. Do you think it will become as widely implemented as
COFF?
COFF is an object file format which incidentally includes debugging info.
COFF is no longer widely used, for a variety of reasons.
The ELF object file format is much more widely used than COFF, which is
only used on a few older architectures for mostly historical reasons.
(COFF was the object format for Unix System V Release 3, but was replaced
by ELF in Release 4. Systems derived from SVR3 might use COFF instead
of ELF.)
Microsoft adopted a modified version of COFF as the PE or PE-COFF object
file format for Windows NT, but they use an entirely different (and mostly
undocumented) debugging format.
Which debuggers use it effectively?
GDB and a number of commercial debuggers, such as TotalView.
--
Michael Eager eager@xxxxxxxxxxxx
1960 Park Blvd., Palo Alto, CA 94306 650-325-8077
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