ARM: CONFIG_FRAME_POINTER

Hunter, Jon
2009-05-12T21:46:36Z

Hi All,

I have been doing some testing with the latest linux-omap kernel on the 3430sdp and the kernel appeared to hang on start-up during the delay loop calibration.

After debugging this I found that this was being caused because there was a difference in the compilation flags being used when compiling this kernel version and an earlier kernel version. Please note that I am using the code sourcery arm2007q3 compiler version (gcc 4.2.1) which is old I know!

Investigating further I noticed that the source of the different kernel compilation flags was due to the fact that kernel option "CONFIG_FRAME_POINTER" was missing from the .config. Although this is declared in the defconfig for the 3430sdp but it was not getting copied over to the .config.

Looking at the lib/Kconfig.debug it appears that there is a new option added back in January called "ARCH_WANT_FRAME_POINTERS" [1]. And only if this new option is defined in the ARCH Kconfig will CONFIG_FRAME_POINTER be used. Today this is not defined for ARM.

I know this is the linux-omap list and not linux-arm but wanted to see if anyone had any comments/inputs about this and whether I should be using a newer compiler.

[1] http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux-2.6.git;a=commitdiff;h=64dec40ddee9d36d7b83f8a0513fdeaffe260a0e;hp=a3c6018e565dc07cf3738ace6bbe412f97b1bba8

Cheers
Jon