RFA: Skip ARM ELF Mapping symbols when showing disassembly
Andrew Cagney
ac131313@redhat.com
Tue Nov 18 17:20:00 GMT 2003
> So GDB and objdump both need this information? How does objdump handle
>> all this?
>>
>> - should there be a BFD method that lets GDB better identify a user
>> visibile [minimal] symbol (gdb's elf reader currently contains what can
>> only be described as heuristics).
>>
>> - should there be a BFD method that, given an address and symbol table,
>> indicates the relevant ISA/ABI?
>>
>> - or even just have BFD export name->addr and addr->name methods?
>>
>> Andrew
>>
>
>
> The real question should be "what does gdb/objdump need to know?". I
> think the answer to this is that it needs to know what is at a particular
> address in an image. In other words, it needs to be asking "what type of
> object is at address X?" How that information is stored in the image is
> not of particular interest outside of the BFD. In particular, it
> shouldn't matter whether the information is stored in mapping symbols or
> some other section in the object file.
>
> So I think the bfd needs to export a bfd_map_address_to_type() interface
> that hides all the details of the representation behind it. What's less
> clear is what types need to be returned, for ARM we really need to return
> something like BFD_OBJECT_DATA, BFD_OBJECT_ARM or BFD_OBJECT_THUMB, but it
> would vary from processor to processor.
It's at this point, things get weird.
BFD hands GDB a raw symbol table (ignoring coff m'kay) and then GDB
implements the search algorithm. To implement a addr->attrib method,
BFD's going to need a mechanism for searching GDB's symbol table and/or
get at the underlying bfd symbol table.
That's why I mention the third one. Throw the whole problem back at BFD
:-) Why does GDB even need a minimal symbol table anyway ....
Andrew
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