Re: AArch64 and fixed return address register (x30)

[Luis Machado <luis.machado@arm.com>]

Hi,

On 1/3/23 00:50, Sylwester Garncarek via Gdb wrote:
> Hi All,
> 
> I've been working on adding CFI directives to assembler sources (GNU Asm) of an RTOS and I noticed that GDB seems to ignore .cfi_return_column directive. I checked GDB sources and indeed for AArch64 architecture the return address is fixed to x30 register. Normally this is not a problem, but for exception/interrupt the return address is in ELR_mode register. Because GDB is fixed to x30, there is no way to get a valid call stack. Are there any plans to make the return address register adjustable according to the info provided in DWARF data?

It used to be the case that gdb only restored the PC from x30. A recent (ish) patch (1fe8486103e482bcd6cd74fdbf79a7d2ab9b111f) adjusted gdb so the PC can be explicitly set.

You can check how the test does it, and replicate the CFI (gdb.arch/aarch64-unwind-pc.S). From what I recall, gdb was taught about the existence of a formal PC column, which is documented in the aadwarf64 spec [1].

Hopefully that will be useful for your use case.

[1] https://github.com/ARM-software/abi-aa/blob/2022Q1/aadwarf64/aadwarf64.rst#dwarf-register-names

> 
> Thanks,
> Sylwester