Re: ELF and DWARF tools ?

"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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