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DWARF2 [was Re: IA32 bootstrap error]
- From: Bryce McKinlay <bryce at waitaki dot otago dot ac dot nz>
- To: Daniel Berlin <dan at cgsoftware dot com>
- Cc: Richard Kenner <kenner at vlsi1 dot ultra dot nyu dot edu>, robertlipe at usa dot net, gcc at gcc dot gnu dot org
- Date: Mon, 31 Dec 2001 18:11:48 +1300
- Subject: DWARF2 [was Re: IA32 bootstrap error]
- References: <Pine.LNX.4.33.0112301839070.4664-100000@www.cgsoftware.com>
Daniel Berlin wrote:
>There are in fact, other things in dwarf2 we can't emit right now because
>gdb doesn't support them. Location lists come to mind. As do inter-CU
>references. There are plenty of other caveats. C++ debugging, is
>completely dependent on the fact that we emit a DW_AT_MIPS_linkage_name
>attribute that is non-standard. GDB falls down a lot without it (though
>it's being fixed).
>
My concern about dwarf2 being the default is the large amount of bloat
that it seems to add. For example, a libgcj.so which was around 10MB
with stabs is now over 20MB with dwarf2 (and even bigger when not using
the latest binutils). The debugging info is twice as large as the code!
For a static library the situtation is even worse.
Its nice to distribute a debuggable libgcj, but the size overhead is
beginnning to make it impractical in some case. Perhaps there are
missing features in GDB which would allow GCC to produce smaller output?
regards
Bryce.