IEEE 695 symbol support for GDB/BFD

[Chris Lewkowski <chrislewkowski at yahoo dot com>]

Hi,

I have been trying to use GDB with IEEE 695 symbol
object file for 
debugging a m68k remote board.  I configured GDB with
a target of 
m68k-motorola-ieee and that built fine.  When I run
GDB and load an IEEE 695 
file I get the following error:

I'm sorry, Dave, I can't do that.  Symbol format
'ieee' unknown.

I tracked this down to the function find_sym_fns() in
file symfile.c.  
After doing some more investigation I believe that
GDB/BFD does not 
have any methods for reading these types of symbol
files, although it does 
recognise the format.  I believe that the file
ieeeread.c (and 
functionality of course) will need to be created for
GDB as well as supporting 
read functions in the BFD library.  I am considering
creating this 
functionality but have a few questions first:

1) Has anyone attempted this before?

2) Does what I have described above seem like the
correct path to take 
to support this object/executable file format?  Can
someone give me 
some pointers on the best way to add this
functionality?

3) Does anyone have any additional (to the standard
gdb docs) relevant 
information about the functionality of GDB's symbol
interpreting 
engine? and what steps should be taken to do this?

I have used the binutils program objdump and that has
the capability to 
read the IEEE 695 symbol files.  So hopefully I can
re-use a lot of the 
code from there.

Any help would be greatly appreciated,

Thanks,

Chris



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