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Re: Defaulting to stabs debug output from AS Cygwin64


Am 15.05.2018 um 19:17 schrieb Michael Enright:

The GCC driver uses -gdwarf2 if you do 'gcc -g' on a .s file. Using
-gdwarf2 with assembly code manually or through gcc is successful in
producing a Cygwin64 executable that Cygwin64 GDB can work with. This
combination of circumstances led me to wonder how stabs was chosen for
Cygwin64.

Basically because it was not chosen. It's not even actually supported, as evidenced by those relocation failures: not how those occurred in the .stab section.

"The" default of Cygwin is whatever the compiler uses, i.e. Dwarf2, and was indeed chosen, because none of the older formats stand a chance of really handling the amount and complexity of debug information needed for modern-day C++.

On to of that, making '-gdwarf-2' the default -g mode for 'as' would be an exercise in futility anyway, because that option is essentially a no-op. That's because Dwarf-2 debug information is _not_ actually created by the -g flag to begin with: it's spelled out by the compiler as reams of data and reloc statements, to go into specially named sections like '.debug_info'. GCC doesn't even pass any '-g' flag to the assembler in its default -gdwarf-2 mode.

It makes sense that "as -g" equals "as -gstabs" because unlike the other ones, that one at least does something: it causes .def pseudo-ops to put data into the .stab section, which also is automatically created by that option.

In a nutshell: you don't want to use either of "as -g" or "as -gstabs"


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