Embedded Programming Concepts@DWARF

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If you find something missing, Please provide feedback in comment box so that I can take corrective action. I discussed about Motorola S record, ELF format in the  last blog post.   I strongly recommend you to read earlier blogs for better understanding .

Key TakeawayDebug symbol generation and compiler optimization  concepts.

How to generate debugging sybols by  gcc ? 

As per WiKi DWARF(Debugging With Attributed Record Format) . As per DWARF standard  , DWARF stands for Debugging With Arbitrary Record Format.

One can generate DWARF symbols using -g option with gcc and print the same using -w option with readelf utility. We can also use nm(name managing) binary utility of linux to inspect generated  ELF.

Verification of Debug symbol generation with x86-64

In this experiment , first hello.c is compiled without -g option and later with -g option. Both the outputs were read by nm -al and stored in text files. Then diff was used to find the difference. As expected, -g option output has information of source file path used.

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Inspection of RISCV Release and Debug binaries 

Here I am repeating the nm and diff commands as done above. The release binary has no debugging information.

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If source level debugging is desired, Avoid any compiler optimization which can lead to mismatch of source code and executable binary.

For final release(without debug information) , You may use suitable optimization flag. There are different optimization options (-O0,-O1,-O2,-O3,-Os,-Ofast) available. One can choose as per requirement. e.g If small code size is required , You may use-Os.  Please refer to this for detail.

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