DWARF: Difference between revisions

For the medical condition, see Dwarfism.

DWARF (short for Debug With Attributed Record Format although rarely seen that way) is a widely used, standardized debugging data format.

DWARF was originally introduced along with ELF. It proved to be excessively voluminous, and it was superseded by an incompatible successor DWARF-2, which added various encoding schemes to reduce data size.

DWARF was not immediately successful; for instance, when Sun Microsystems adopted ELF as part of their move to Solaris, they opted to continue using stabs, in an embedding known as stabs-in-elf. Linux followed suit, and DWARF-2 did not become the default until the late 1990s.

The DWARF version 3 specification was released in January 2006 (DWARF3 2006).

References

• "DWARF Version 3 Standard Released" (Press release). Free Standards Group. 2006-01-04. {{cite press release}}: Check date values in: |date= (help); Cite has empty unknown parameter: |1= (help); Unknown parameter |Ref= ignored (|ref= suggested) (help)

External links

• The DWARF Debugging Standard
• DWARF Debugging Information Format Specification Version 3.0
• DWARF Debugging Information Format Specification Version 2.0
• libdwarf, a library and a tool (dwarfdump) to access DWARF information
• A set of tools to convert DWARF and ELF information into XML and use it to generate callgraphs
• A little article trying to explain the basics of reading DWARF 2 informations