DWARF 2 sections and padding ?

[Brian Ford]

I am trying to add DWARF 2 support for PE/COFF on Cygwin.  PE/COFF
sections must be aligned to 512 byte boundaries.  This extra padding
confuses the DWARF 2 parsing routines because they use the sections
raw_size, thus parsing an invalid compilation unit header (all
zeros).

The actual, smaller size is available in the section header.  I am
confused about what the cooked_size is supposed to mean.  It is currently
zero, but I think it could contain the smaller virtual size.

I have read the DWARF spec several times, and although it discusses this
issue briefly for some debugging sections, it is unclear to me how this
should really work.  Unless I try to arrange for the producer (gcc) to
pad the compilation units with zeros instead of having bfd pad the end of
the sections, I don't know how to proceed.

I would like to just use an alternate size instead of the raw size (cooked
maybe?) but I don't know how this would affect other targets and I don't
want a PE specific hack in DWARF parsing code.

Any ideas?  Thanks.

-- 
Brian Ford
Senior Realtime Software Engineer
VITAL - Visual Simulation Systems
FlightSafety International
Phone: 314-551-8460
Fax:   314-551-8444