Hello, In this stabs vs. dwarf discussion, so far it's more been about assumptions than numbers. So let's throw in some numbers!
The following debug sizes are for CSiBE-v2.1.1 on mipsisa64-elf, with the LRA branch at r195108. All CSiBE test cases are packages written in C. Debug size is computed as the total size of all ".stabs*" or ".debug*" sections as computed by "size -A" (sysv style size output) on individual object files (so before linking) and summed up by awk (*). Tested debug formats are "none", "stabs", "dwarf2", and "dwarf4". Compiler options were "-Os" for all four tested debug formats. Debug info was output with "-gstabs", "-gdwarf-2", and "-gdwarf-4". And the results are: package stabs dwarf2 dwarf4 bzip2-1.0.2 372772 289386 279670 cg_compiler... 1355948 1381734 1314676 compiler 152178 156644 148458 flex-2.5.31 665588 511856 488256 jikespg-1.3 944126 773358 749050 jpeg-6b 3285854 2186640 2110290 libmspack 602692 421792 407070 libpng-1.2.5 1064722 1017116 975098 linux-2.4.23... 53617230 40921246 38353402 lwip-0.5.3... 576260 402830 381902 mpeg2dec-0.3.1 492918 336912 327072 mpgcut-1.1 46956 51854 49490 OpenTCP-1.0.4 873008 223646 212822 replaypc-0.4... 1009322 445296 424136 teem-1.6.0-src 13374436 7259308 6954802 ttt-0.10.1... 208516 113828 109776 unrarlib-0.4.0 91236 79396 75256 zlib-1.1.4 280272 201392 193506 TOTAL 79014034 56774234 53554732 DEBUG/TEXT 16.49 11.85 11.18 (*) the test script actually takes the sum of sizes for all ".text*", ".stabs*", and ".debug*" sections, and the ".text*" size is subtracted to get the debug info sizes. Unless someone can shoot holes in this test approach, the results suggest that DWARF debug size is *smaller* than stabs, at least for mipsisa64. Ciao! Steven
