I'm still digging through the details of this bug, but I wanted to get something written down so I can add it to the 7.9 wiki. [Whether a fix can make it into 7.9 remains to be seen.] Gold adds "(anonymous namespace)" to .gdb_index, but gdb doesn't use that name in expanded symbol tables. new_symbol_full sees a missing name and thus skips the symbol. This is causing symbol lookup issues. [More to follow ...]
Part of the original problem was addressed with the patches for PR 17591. The remaining issue is both a performance and a correctness issue: anonymous namespaces don't, when new_symbol_full is called, have names. Thus they are not entered into the symbol table. The correctness issue is PR 17974. The remainder of this bug is the perf issue.
Correction: The bug for the correctness issue is PR 17976, not 17974.
The master branch has been updated by Doug Evans <devans@sourceware.org>: https://sourceware.org/git/gitweb.cgi?p=binutils-gdb.git;h=96553a0cffb30d2ac6068eb71bed38ea7432073b commit 96553a0cffb30d2ac6068eb71bed38ea7432073b Author: Doug Evans <dje@google.com> Date: Sat Feb 21 21:58:31 2015 -0800 PR c++/17976, symtab/17821 This patch addresses two issues. The basic problem is that "(anonymous namespace)" doesn't get entered into the symbol table because when dwarf2read.c:new_symbol_full is called the DIE has no name (dwarf2_name returns NULL). PR 17976: ptype '(anonymous namespace)' should work like any namespace PR 17821: perf issue looking up (anonymous namespace) bash$ gdb monster-program (gdb) mt set per on (gdb) mt set symbol-cache-size 0 (gdb) break (anonymous namespace)::foo Before: Command execution time: 3.266289 (cpu), 6.169030 (wall) Space used: 811429888 (+12910592 for this command) After: Command execution time: 1.264076 (cpu), 4.057408 (wall) Space used: 798781440 (+0 for this command) gdb/ChangeLog: PR c++/17976, symtab/17821 * cp-namespace.c (cp_search_static_and_baseclasses): New parameter is_in_anonymous. All callers updated. (find_symbol_in_baseclass): Ditto. (cp_lookup_nested_symbol_1): Ditto. Don't search all static blocks for symbols in an anonymous namespace. * dwarf2read.c (namespace_name): Don't call dwarf2_name, fetch DW_AT_name directly. (dwarf2_name): Convert missing namespace name to CP_ANONYMOUS_NAMESPACE_STR. gdeb/testsuite/ChangeLog: * gdb.cp/anon-ns.exp: Add test for ptype '(anonymous namespace)'.
patch committed