From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (qmail 14855 invoked by alias); 22 Aug 2008 16:49:42 -0000 Received: (qmail 14844 invoked by uid 22791); 22 Aug 2008 16:49:41 -0000 X-Spam-Check-By: sourceware.org Received: from ug-out-1314.google.com (HELO ug-out-1314.google.com) (66.249.92.173) by sourceware.org (qpsmtpd/0.31) with ESMTP; Fri, 22 Aug 2008 16:49:07 +0000 Received: by ug-out-1314.google.com with SMTP id o4so171093uge.39 for ; Fri, 22 Aug 2008 09:49:04 -0700 (PDT) Received: by 10.187.171.8 with SMTP id y8mr106793fao.57.1219423744507; Fri, 22 Aug 2008 09:49:04 -0700 (PDT) Received: by 10.187.224.15 with HTTP; Fri, 22 Aug 2008 09:49:04 -0700 (PDT) Message-ID: <8a15eb2b0808220949vffa9aaqe2c4c635857d83d7@mail.gmail.com> Date: Fri, 22 Aug 2008 20:43:00 -0000 From: "Gabe Black" Reply-To: gabe@blackfam.net To: gdb@sourceware.org Subject: MSVC and DIA MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Disposition: inline Mailing-List: contact gdb-help@sourceware.org; run by ezmlm Precedence: bulk List-Id: List-Subscribe: List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: , Sender: gdb-owner@sourceware.org X-SW-Source: 2008-08/txt/msg00263.txt.bz2 In a couple of other posts I alluded to debugging a target in which I did not have symbol information. The target is a custom RTOS running on an i386 architecture built using different versions of the MSVC compiler. I've investigated using Visual Studio to debug the target and even talked with MS but the amount of work to implement a "Debugging Engine" to provide this facility is really not worth it. Furthermore, Microsoft will not allow us to use WinDBG to debug on the target as well since it isn't a "Windows" target (even though WinDBG did work for us). GDB seems like a viable alternative, and all that seems to be missing is symbol interpretation. Microsoft provides the Debug Interface Access SDK (DIA) which I did not find referenced in any of the mailing lists. It is an SDK that allows you to get at any of the debug/symbol information in a PDB even if the format of the PDB changes. I would like to add PDB symbol support to GDB. I am fairly new to GDB but I have been able to implement the remote stub running on the target without much trouble. However the challenge lies in adding the symbol support. From what I understand, BFD is where I would need to add the PDB symbol support. I didn't find much about it in the gdb online documentation, both in the user manual and internal documentation. Does anyone have any pointers or references of documentation/files to look at to help me get started? We've tasted the sweetness of using a source-level debugger and we want more! Am I off my rocker in attempting this?! Thanks, Gabe