[LLVMdev] More on dwarf debugging

Talin viridia at gmail.com
Fri Oct 2 22:38:24 PDT 2009


I've been working on getting my front end to generate the proper 
source-level debugging intrinsics, and I have a couple of observations:

1) I've never actually been able to get gdb to recognize my debug data. 
I've tried the various -O0 and disabling frame pointer elimination, and 
when I look at the assembly it seems OK, but gdb just won't recognize 
it. I've even tried downloading a more recent version of gdb, but 
unfortunately the latest official gdb release won't configure under OS 
X, and when I tried checking out the branch head it wouldn't compile.

2) It's very hard to determine whether or not the generated debug 
information is correct. One reason is that the way that debug 
information is encoded in LL files is essentially unreadable. I can look 
at a typical IR file and puzzle out what the code is supposed to be 
doing, but there's no easy way to look at the metadata and verify that 
it is correct.

What I would like to see is either (a) a way to encode debugging 
information in the module that is slightly easier on the eyes, or (b) 
some sort of pretty-printer utility that would take in a module and 
print a summary of the debug info for a given symbol.

-- Talin




More information about the llvm-dev mailing list