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Adding a New Symbol Reader to GDB
If you are using an existing object file format (a.out, COFF, ELF, etc), there is probably little to be done.
If you need to add a new object file format, you must first add it to BFD. This is beyond the scope of this document.
You must then arrange for the BFD code to provide access to the debugging symbols. Generally GDB will have to call swapping routines from BFD and a few other BFD internal routines to locate the debugging information. As much as possible, GDB should not depend on the BFD internal data structures.
For some targets (e.g., COFF), there is a special transfer vector used to call swapping routines, since the external data structures on various platforms have different sizes and layouts. Specialized routines that will only ever be implemented by one object file format may be called directly. This interface should be described in a file bfd/lib''xyz''.h, which is included by GDB.