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Re: Ping: RFC: add dwarf support for xcoff/AIX


On Apr 26, 2011, at 10:30 AM, Richard Sandiford wrote:

> Tristan Gingold <gingold@adacore.com> writes:
>>> * because section names are limited to 8 characters, the standard
>>> dwarf names cannot be used.  XCOFF defines alternate names (.dwinfo,
>>> .dwline...)  But to simplify the interface with gdb and objdump, the
>>> xcoff back-end automatically canonicalize the names to the standard
>>> dwarf names.  To do this I added a coff hook (expand_section_name)
>>> and a new coff macro (adjust_scnhdr_before_swap).  Not sure that this
>>> conversion is a good idea, so comments are welcome here.
> 
> I can see the attraction of this, but does it mean that objcopy and
> objdump operations on the original ("real") sections won't work?

Indeed, you will have to use the elf names.  That's the minor price to pay.

> That might be a bit confusing for human (rather than scripted)
> users of the tools.  Especially if you use the AIX and GNU tools
> together.

OTOH, users of GNU tools would find the XCOFF convention weird, and might prefer to stay with the standard elf names.

> 
> An alternative might be to have a pointer to a table of section names
> in the bfd_target structure.  We could then replace direct uses of
> ".debug_frame" etc. with uses of accessor macros.  What do others think?


Tristan.


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