Re: [ANNOUNCE] pahole and other DWARF2 utilities

Andrew Morton
2006-10-31T04:33:42Z

On Mon, 30 Oct 2006 18:33:19 -0300
Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo <acme@mandriva.com> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I've been working on some DWARF2 utilities and thought that it
> is about time I announce it to the community, so that what is already
> available can be used by people interested in reducing structure sizes
> and otherwise taking advantage of the information available in the elf
> sections of files compiled with 'gcc -g' or in the case of the kernel
> with CONFIG_DEBUG_INFO enabled, so here it goes the description of said
> tools:
>
> pahole: Poke-a-Hole is a tool to find out holes in structures, holes
> being defined as the space between members of functions due to alignemnt
> rules that could be used for new struct entries or to reorganize
> existing structures to reduce its size, without more ado lets see what
> that means:
>
> ...
>
> Further ideas on how to use the DWARF2 information include tools
> that will show where inlines are being used, how much code is added by
> inline functions,

It would be quite useful to be able to identify inlined functions which are
good candidates for uninlining.