Re: Looking to contribute OMF support

[Bernd Jendrissek <bernd dot jendrissek at gmail dot com>]

On Mon, Dec 21, 2009 at 11:38 AM, Greatwolf <gmane.greatwolf@mamber.net> wrote:
> This thread is kind of old but I was wondering whatever happened to this
> endeavor of hacking OMF support into libbfd. Did it ever come to
> fruitation?
>
> I'm looking for borland/delphi source debugging support with gdb and
> came across this thread. If OMF support is fully implemented into bfd,
> would anything more have to be done to get source level debugging to
> work in gdb for executables/dll's compiled with something other than
> gcc? Specifically compiles that emit OMF symbolic debug info like
> borland c++ build. I beleive Digital Mars Compiler emits OMF symbolic
> info as well.

I'm busy sorting out the paperwork for implementation #2
(reimplemented it for reasons I'll omit here).  I'm quite a bit behind
the mainline repository; I'm not sure how much rework I'll have to do
to get it up to date.

It's fairly minimal support too, and it's only for 16-bit OMF
(although 32-bit objects seem to be merely an extension of the 16-bit
format).  Specifically, I did not even try to add support for
debugging info.  My OMF support only provides for disassembling OMF
files, and possibly linking them; that seemed far more valuable than
also adding support for OMF as an output format, since there are
already free assemblers such as NASM that can do that job.

OTOH, if you could document the debug info (or point me at a resource
that does so), I could at least know how much effort it would be to
add.  Feel like sending me some sample object files to work with?
Send them directly to me, so I don't lose them in a pile of 3000-odd
unread binutils messages!