Re: [patch] PR ld/11817 Revert part of compressed debug patch to fix ld breakage

[Cary Coutant <ccoutant at google dot com>]

> I started working on compressed debug section support. My changes
> are on the hjl/compress branch at:
>
> http://git.kernel.org/?p=devel/binutils/hjl/x86.git;a=summary

Thanks, that looks good. It looks like it's set up so that bfd clients
will see the section name without the 'z', so the existing code in
binutils and gdb that decompresses the .zdebug sections simply won't
trigger. I imagine that code can eventually be removed.

If I understand your changes, it looks like you'll read and decompress
the section into a buffer when the file is opened, right? Knowing that
the decompressed size is easily obtained from the first 12 bytes of
the section, wouldn't it be easy enough to just set the section size
the to decompressed value and defer the actual reading and
decompression until needed?

I was thinking the right way to do this would probably be to keep the
section name unchanged, but change the section type from SHT_PROGBITS
to SHT_GNU_COMPRESSED_BITS.

-cary