Re: [avr-chat] Preferred debugging/executable format (ELF vs. DWARF)?

[Joerg Wunsch]

Galen Seitz <address@hidden> wrote:

> Currently I believe avr-gdb only supports stabs(an older debugging
> format).

AVR-GDB "incidentically" also understands DWARF-2 debugging
information.  However, unlike stabs debugging which has been tuned for
the AVR requirements inside GDB, no tuning whatsoever has been done
for DWARF-2, so the support for it is rather a side-effect of GDB
understanding DWARF-2 for other architectures (in particular, for the
mainstream i386 and x86_64 ones).  Thus, it has a number of artifacts
that seriously restrict its usability.  For example, the offset
0x800000 trick for RAM addresses is not known, so any RAM variable
will be looked up in the ROM area instead.  I assume access to
function parameters on the stack might not work either (this could
happen for variadic argument lists, or for function taking an
exorbitant amount of parameters).

> If you're looking for a project, adding DWARF support to avr-gdb
> would be a great thing to contribute.

I agree.

-- 
cheers, J"org               .-.-.   --... ...--   -.. .  DL8DTL

http://www.sax.de/~joerg/                        NIC: JW11-RIPE
Never trust an operating system you don't have sources for. ;-)