From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (qmail 24604 invoked by alias); 19 Apr 2005 11:44:31 -0000 Mailing-List: contact binutils-help@sources.redhat.com; run by ezmlm Precedence: bulk List-Subscribe: List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: , Sender: binutils-owner@sources.redhat.com Received: (qmail 24172 invoked from network); 19 Apr 2005 11:44:22 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO mx1.redhat.com) (66.187.233.31) by sourceware.org with SMTP; 19 Apr 2005 11:44:22 -0000 Received: from int-mx1.corp.redhat.com (int-mx1.corp.redhat.com [172.16.52.254]) by mx1.redhat.com (8.12.11/8.12.11) with ESMTP id j3JBiKBu019168; Tue, 19 Apr 2005 07:44:20 -0400 Received: from pobox.surrey.redhat.com (pobox.surrey.redhat.com [172.16.10.17]) by int-mx1.corp.redhat.com (8.11.6/8.11.6) with ESMTP id j3JBiJO30860; Tue, 19 Apr 2005 07:44:19 -0400 Received: from [172.31.0.98] (vpnuser7.surrey.redhat.com [172.16.9.7]) by pobox.surrey.redhat.com (8.12.8/8.12.8) with ESMTP id j3JBiHkk031104; Tue, 19 Apr 2005 12:44:17 +0100 Message-ID: <4264EEC0.5030505@redhat.com> Date: Tue, 19 Apr 2005 11:44:00 -0000 From: Nick Clifton User-Agent: Mozilla Thunderbird 1.0 (X11/20041206) MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Ian Lance Taylor CC: Andy Chittenden , binutils@sourceware.org, Martin Dorey Subject: Re: excessive stab information References: <89E85E0168AD994693B574C80EDB9C2701ADB697@uk-email.terastack.bluearc.com> In-Reply-To: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-SW-Source: 2005-04/txt/msg00509.txt.bz2 Hi Ian, > Ian Lance Taylor wrote: > There has been some work done on not linking debug information from > the object files into the executable, and having gdb fetch it from the > object files, but I'm not sure what the status of that is. I didn't > see anything in the linker docs about it. FYI: This feature is fully working. The reason it is not documented in the linker docs however is because it is not performed by the linker. It is performed by the objcopy program using the --strip-debug, --only-keep-debug and --add-gnu-debuglink switches. You can find out more about this from the binutils documentation. A word of caution for anyone considering using this feature however. It is definitely known to work with GDB and DWARF (1,2 and 3) debug information. I do not know if it has been tested with STABS debug information however, although theoretically there is no reason why it should not work. Also since it is making use of a GNU extension, it probably only works with GDB, or debuggers based on GDB. (Plus of course you need a fairly modern version of GDB in order to make use of this feature). Cheers Nick