Defaulting to stabs debug output from AS Cygwin64

Michael Enright mike@kmcardiff.com
Tue May 15 12:49:00 GMT 2018


I am working on a little compiler for fun, which generates assembly
code. At this point I manually invoke as and ld.

For debugging I added the -g option to the invocation of as, but then
ld failed with

 t.o:t.s:1:(.stab+0x14): relocation truncated to fit: R_X86_64_32
against `.text'

Looking into this on Stack Overflow I was taught that stabs is
obsolete. I think 'obsolete' may not be quite the right
interpretation, but 'wrong for Cygwin64' could be the right story.
Practically speaking, without thinking about it too critically,
-gdwarf2 in place of -g is the solution.

I'm trying to find authority for saying anything exact about the situation:
1) Is there a reason why stabs is the default for '-g' with Cygwin64?
1a) Is a patch desired to make dwarf2 the default?
2) Is there a way within Cygwin64 that a .o file with stabs can be
properly processed by ld to give proper input to gdb?
3) Is stabs fatally flawed for the purposes of Cygwin64 or could it be
upgraded, within the existing meaning of the stabs specification, so
that it would work?
3a) To put it another way, is this just a stabs bug that could be
fixed for Cygwin64?

Above when I say Cygwin64, I'm talking about straightforward native
use of as, ld, and gdb, not cross-compiling to some other platform.

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