Re: RFA: Skip ARM ELF Mapping symbols when showing disassembly

[Daniel Jacobowitz <drow@mvista.com>]

On Thu, Nov 13, 2003 at 02:45:07PM +0000, Richard Earnshaw wrote:
> > Hi Guys,
> > 
> >   I have recently committed a patch to the arm-elf port of GAS which
> >   causes it to generate special mapping symbols as required by the ARM
> >   ELF spec.  Unfortunately this now means that when GDB shows a
> >   disassembly it can select one of the mapping symbols instead of the
> >   proper function name symbol.
> > 
> >   The patch below is a fix for this problem.  It is not elegant, but
> >   it does have the advantage of being entirely arm specific.  A
> >   cleaner patch would require changes to generic code, which I did not
> >   feel comfortable doing.
> > 
> >   May I apply this patch ?
> > 
> > Cheers
> >         Nick
> > 
> 
> I wonder whether a better way to handle all this is to override 
> slurp_symbol_table for arm-elf to a routine that just skips the mapping 
> symbols entirely (or at least, doesn't put them into the list that it 
> passes back to its caller), then to add a separate function to slurp the 
> mapping symbols independently.  Then gdb and the disassembler (and the 
> linker error reports) would all just work normally.
> 
> It would be necessary to add support for copying and fixing up the mapping 
> symbols when linking, but that's probably not too hard.

FWIW, I think this is a good idea.

I don't want to end up with them in the symbol table for GDB; there
could be a substantial number of them (especially if the linker emits
them for interworking veneers), and they could have nasty adverse
effects on the hash table.  Plus a symbol table isn't a useful data
structure for this information, I think, just a convenient way to store
it in the object file.

I have always envisioned this sort of information being carried by
.debug_line instead, but of course that doesn't meet the same needs as
the mapping symbols.

-- 
Daniel Jacobowitz
MontaVista Software                         Debian GNU/Linux Developer