Re: arm-elf message

[Nick Clifton <nickc at cygnus dot com>]

Hi Joel,

: I am using arm-rtems which is arm-elf aliased to arm-rtems for 
: both binutils and gdb.  When I try to load the resulting 
: executable in the simulator in gdb, I get an error message
: I assume is from the BFD.

Actually it is from gdb, specifically from
dwarf2_build_psymtabs_hard() in gdb/dwarf2read.c.

: Dwarf Error: bad offset (0xb91c0) in compilation unit header (offset
: 0x0 + 6).
:
: What does this message mean

I assume that you know what a compilation unit is.

It means that in the header describing the dwarf2 debug information
for a particular compilation unit, the offset into the .debug.abbrev
section is actually bigger than that section's size, (and hence must
be wrong/corrupt).

:  and more importantly what is broken?

Well it sounds like the compilation unit header is corrupt.  These
headers are usually the first data that occurs in the debugging
sections, so it is possible that the headers have been overwritten by
data from whichever section comes before the debug section ...

: I have forced some extra data in my .bss section and it turns out
: that 0xb91c0 is the _end of the entire program image.  

And by "forced" you mean what ?

This forcing, whatever it is, is probably the source of your
problems.  I would begin my investigation there.

Cheers
	Nick