From: "Mark E." <snowball3 AT bigfoot DOT com>
To: djgpp-workers AT delorie DOT com
Date: Sat, 25 Nov 2000 22:39:58 -0500
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Subject: Re: Binutils 2.10 update #2, garbage alignment problem still present
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> Btw, I see that Binutils 2.10.1 has been released.  Are the patches 
> significant enough to apply them?

I'm revisiting this since I've had a change to take a good look at 2.10. I've 
found that only one of my post 2.10 fixes have been included. Therefore I 
don't think it's worth the trouble to release a port of 2.10.1 since most of 
the fixes are more than likely for the more popular platforms and my fixes 
are already in the 2.10 port.

I also taken a look at what it would take to add dwarf2 support since I've 
been hearing here and other places that it's supposed to be better than stabs 
for C++ debugging. Configuring in dwarf2 support for gcc is rather trivial 
(tested with gcc 2.95.2, since I won't be able to mess with CVS gcc until an 
upcoming memory upgrade.). 

Binutils will probably need some changes. One of the bigger changes will be 
that binutils know how to set the right alignment for dwarf2 sections. The 
DJGPP config can be changed to recognize these section names and set the 
right alignment accordingly, but I think this is a bad way to go. Certain 
sections have their alignment set accordingly based on their names because 
currently there is no way to store the alignment (output from gcc using the 
.p2align directive) like some flavors of COFF do. BTW, ELF has a field in the 
section header to store the alignment information. If we allocate some of the 
many unused bits in the section header flags to store the alignment, the 
hooks are already present in binutils can be used to store/read these bits. 
All that has to be done in DJGPP's config is tell binutils how the store/read 
the alignment value. Then in the future special section names won't require 
special handling by Binutils except perhaps with a linker script change.

I have no idea what changes gdb will require, but I assume the changes to the 
binutils bfd library will go a long way toward supporting dwarf2 there too.

Mark