Andi Kleen <a...@firstfloor.org> writes:
> Rainer Orth <r...@cebitec.uni-bielefeld.de> writes:
>
>> There's some interest inside Oracle to support compressed debug sections
>> inside their toolchain, both on Solaris and Linux. So far, there's the
>> GNU style supported by gas, gld, gold, and gdb, which mangles section
>> names (.debug_* -> .zdebug_*), but consultation with the Solaris linker
>> engineers resulted in a different style, now (almost) approved for the
>> ELF gABI. The final proposal can be found here:
>>
>> https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/generic-abi/dBOS1H47Q64/Fm_Jh9vOlG8J
>
> None of the messages explains why the new format is better than the
> existing one. For GNU this seems to have zero value.
It's at the beginning of the first message. Besides, if you look at
binutils sources with several large tables mapping .debug_* to .zdebug_*
sections, there's lots of complexitiy involved in the traditional
format and the name mangling involved.
Anyway, this is now part of the gABI, and the patch at hand also works
with the old GNU style (-gz=zlib-gnu), so it has value even when the
gABI style isn't supported. Having users invoke gcc
-Wa,--compress-debug-sections -Wl,--compress-debug-sections instead of
-gz doesn't seem to be a good user interface to me.
Rainer
--
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Rainer Orth, Center for Biotechnology, Bielefeld University
