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Status Not under consideration
Workspace AIX
Created by Guest
Created on Dec 5, 2016

AIX: GDB feature to read separate .stab files generated via -bstabsplit option

GDB does not have feature to read separate .stab files generated via -bstabsplit option.
This file can be given as input to dbx but GDB is not capable of understanding the file format.

With gcc we have an option "-gstabs+" which produce debugging information in stabs format using GNU extensions understood only by GDB but it does NOT create any separate file .stab extension.

This -bstabsplit option is introducing an entry "debug@xxxx" in the symbol table which refers to the offset in separate .stab file's debug section.
GDB is not implemented to handle these kind of entries, and this leads to the segmentation fault.

In GDB there is option of adding symbol table e.g. add-symbol-file, but it is not of any use as this option expect a separate debug file which is having all debug symbols
and this is mostly works with elf format.

On other platforms also there aren't any option to generate separate .stab file which our AIX linker can do, that's why this feature is not implemented in GDB yet.

Idea priority Low