PATCH: Compress debug sections for Linux/x86 by default

[H.J. Lu]

On Fri, Jan 9, 2015 at 12:32 AM, Tristan Gingold <gingold@adacore.com> wrote:
>
>> On 09 Jan 2015, at 04:49, H.J. Lu <hjl.tools@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> On Thu, Jan 8, 2015 at 7:40 PM, Joel Brobecker <brobecker@adacore.com> wrote:
>>>> This feature is very generic and should work for all ELF targets.
>>>> Is there anyone who can make a decision to enable it for all ELF
>>>> targets by default?
>>>
>>> Not necessarily any ONE, but the group of Global Maintainers for
>>> the binutils project?
>>>
>>
>> Among global maintainers, Nick and Alan are the most active ones.  I
>> CCed them here.
>>
>> Nick, Alan, should we enable compressed debug section in
>> assembler for all ELF targets?  If not all ELF targets, should we
>> enable it for all Linux targets?
>
> I am not sure that enabling compression for all ELF targets is a good
> idea.  There are many debuggers other than GDB that don't know yet
> how to handle compressed debug section.
>
> I would say this doesn't apply directly to Linux, but I am also sure
> there are many tools using debug info that don't know how to deal
> with compressed sections.
>
> Maybe it would be simpler if the default were controlled by gcc.
>

Most of the consumers of the outputs of assembler are binutils
tools.   Linker won't generate compressed debug sections by
default.  ld.bfd can't even generate compressed debug sections and
gold --compress-debug-sections has an issue:

https://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=17819

Since debuggers mostly deal with the outputs of linker,
they won't even see the compressed debug sections.  Even
if there is a problem, we can run objcopy to decompress the debug
sections.


-- 
H.J.