[llvm-dev] Implementing a DWP tool in LLVM

[David Blaikie via llvm-dev]

Much like the recent efforts to provide a port of dsymutil in the LLVM
project, I'm looking at providing an implementation of the Fission/Split
DWARF DWP tool ( https://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/DebugFissionDWP ) in LLVM.

While there's potentially some overlap between the two tools, I'm thinking
of keeping them separate at least initially since much of the debug info
doesn't need to be touched by a DWP tool, unlike dsymutil.

Basically all the tool needs to do is concatenate (or deduplicate, in the
case of type units) the sections and apply a few domain-specific
relocations, but that doesn't include having to read the DIE tree in
debug_info.dwo (only the headers). The other thing is to build a couple of
indexing data structures to allow fast lookup of CUs and TUs.

Likely I'll start with:

* adding llvm-dwarfdump support for the DWP indexes
* basic prototype of llvm-dwp just concatenating sections
* handle each of the domain specific relocations in turn
  * abbr_offset
  * debug_str_offsets.dwo entries
  * type_unit's DW_AT_stmt_list
  * references to debug_loc.dwo from debug_info.dwo
     * this one, at first blush, makes me particularly sad, as it'll
involve actually walking all the DIEs in any CUs (stmt_list isn't great
either, but at least that'd only be the header - same for accessing the
signature for the CU, it's always in the root DIE)
* deduplicate type units
* add CU/TU indexes
* DWP merging (being able to read existing indexes and merge those into
larger indexes)
* possibly support the thin DWP mode

Does this all seem feasible/plausible/reasonable to do in LLVM? Any
particular points of contention/interest/clarification?

It's possible at some point in the future it might be nice to share the
type merging logic of dsymutil (type units make sense when you don't have a
debug aware linker - but they do have unfortunate overhead which would be
nice to avoid, if possible), in which case there might be some code sharing
opportunity. But the two tools are still going to be fairly different in
their purpose/handling (dsymutil has to get the address mappings and update
all of that, DWP won't  have to deal with code addresses, etc).

- Dave
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