[ros-dev] Proposal to change .sym files

[Hartmut Birr]

Anich Gregor schrieb:

>Converting at runtime could be slow, but we definitly have to convert them 
>into a format which we can save as one large block in memory (and not 
>thousands of small blocks) and easily parse at runtime.
>
>What about using GNU debuglinks? It works like this:
>
>You create the binary with debug info. Then you copy the debug info from the 
>binary into a debug/symbol file. The next step is to strip the debug info 
>from the binary and at the same time add a debug link to the debug file.
>The debug link is a section in the binary (which can be added with objdump 
>when stripping debug info from the binary) called .gnu_debuglink. It must 
>contain the filename of the debug file (zero-terminated) and (aligned to 4 
>bytes) the CRC of the debug file (which makes sure that correct symbols will 
>be used with the binary)
>GNU binutils support it so it's easy to create the symbol files and add the 
>debug links to the binaries.
>
> - blight
>  
>
I'm not sure if you mean objcopy instead of objdump. Objcopy for pe 
images isn't usable, because it changes the file and section 
allignments. I think that we need a tool which creates our new debug 
section as coff object file from the *.nostriped.* and that we need our 
own linker scripts which adds the section at the correct position within 
the image. This needs also a little change in freeldr, because the 
symbol section must be located after the bss section in ntoskrnl.   

- Hartmut