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-gc-sections breaking debugger
von Alfredo C. (tequilaguru)

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Hi,

I been working on a set of tools for a lpc2387 board I developed,

I built openocd(trunk), gcc(4.3.2) and insight(6.8) under Cygwin, those
work very well, I have scrips to download code and to debug the target.
Those work great as well, but I have a problem.

If a build the code with:

LINKER_FLAGS=-nostartfiles -Xlinker -o$(BUILDDIR)/lpc2387.elf -Xlinker
-M -Wl,-Map=$(BUILDDIR)/lpc2387.map,--cref,--gc-sections

and

CFLAGS= $(DEBUG) \
    $(OPTIM) \
    -T$(LDSCRIPT) \
    -mcpu=arm7tdmi \
    -I$(INCLUDEPATH)\
    -D PACK_STRUCT_END=__attribute\(\(packed\)\) \
    -D ALIGN_STRUCT_END=__attribute\(\(aligned\(4\)\)\) \
    -fomit-frame-pointer \
    -mthumb-interwork  \
          -ffreestanding    \
          -ffunction-sections     \
         -fdata-sections    \

The debugger won't allow me to step over to the next line of code, if I
remove the -gc-sections parameter (thus removing dead code elimination)
the debugger will work as expected.

Although the debugger is working, is very annoying to have to step line
per line of code, I can set temporal breakpoints but may be someone had
this problem before?

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Re: -gc-sections breaking debugger
von Alfredo C. (tequilaguru)

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Alfredo Cabral wrote:

Further examination reveals, it was only with the first function.

The rest of the debugging session works as expected.

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Re: -gc-sections breaking debugger
von Spencer O. (ntfreak)

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Alfredo Cabral wrote:
> Alfredo Cabral wrote:
>
> Further examination reveals, it was only with the first function.
>
> The rest of the debugging session works as expected.

generally if using -gc-sections breaks your code then you need to check
the linker script.

Do you have the KEEP sections correctly defined (usually on the reset
vector)?

Cheers
Spen

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Re: -gc-sections breaking debugger
von Alfredo C. (tequilaguru)

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Spencer Oliver wrote:
> Alfredo Cabral wrote:
>> Alfredo Cabral wrote:
>>
>> Further examination reveals, it was only with the first function.
>>
>> The rest of the debugging session works as expected.
>
> generally if using -gc-sections breaks your code then you need to check
> the linker script.
>
> Do you have the KEEP sections correctly defined (usually on the reset
> vector)?
>
> Cheers
> Spen

Spen,

The code compiled and linked fine, the thing is, while debugging it was
impossible to step over a function, Insight jumped into everytime,
however this only happened on a very specific binary, most compiles work
ok, and those that exhibit anomalies, only do so on the very first
function. It drove me nuts at some point because I thought this wasn't
an isolated case, but as I explained above, turns out it was.

Cheers
Alfredo

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