On Fri, Nov 04, 2005 at 06:44:44AM -0700, Eric Blake wrote: >According to Corinna Vinschen on 11/4/2005 6:11 AM: >>The problem is that there's one section in the file, .gnu_debuglink, >>which is defined as a debugging section. strip's job is to remove all >>debug sections. This is usually a simple job to do since the debug >>sections are typically at the end of the file anyway. Not so the >>.gnu_debuglink section. By stripping this out, strip generates an >>invalid PE/COFF file since it leaves an undefined memory hole in the >>address space of the file, which is a no-no with the somewhat overly >>simple Windows runtime loader. > >Wow. Learn something every day. No wonder ELF is so much more popular >in the open source community.
Yeah, we tried hard to convince the open source community to use PE/COFF and to start adopting the use of extensions like '.exe', and '.dll' but you know how they are. >>It's an unlucky case. You could argue that strip should know better >>than to remove debug sections from the middle of a PE/COFF file but >>OTOH the Cygwin DLL is a very special case. > >So the cygwin DLL is likely to be the only PE/COFF dll that strip ever >encounters with a section marked as debug in the middle of a file? Yes. Let me quote from the link that I provided since it seems like you haven't read it: >cgf wrote: >>The splitting of the debug information into a new file is something that >>I've wanted to do for a long time but problems with the standard >>binutils way of accomplishing this task had proven to be daunting for PE >>format executables. I took some time today to try to understand what >>was going wrong and wrote a script to fix up the dll so that information >>about cygwin1.dbg was included in cygwin1.dll in a way that does not >>cause cygwin1.dll to be an invalid binary -- which was the problem >>before. >> >>Eventually, I will fix binutils so that this workaround is no longer >>necessary and, then, it will be possible to create separate debug files >>for any binary, without the need for my fixup. So, to clarify, I was wrong to say that it wasn't a bug before. It is at least arguably a bug that binutils creates a bad dll if you strip cygwin1.dll. However, if you read the above it should be pretty clear that this is a problem that is understood and that notes of concern about the behavior are not required. cgf -- Unsubscribe info: http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple Problem reports: http://cygwin.com/problems.html Documentation: http://cygwin.com/docs.html FAQ: http://cygwin.com/faq/
