On Fri, Jan 29, 2021 at 1:41 PM Jakub Jelinek [off-list ref] wrote:

On Fri, Jan 29, 2021 at 04:32:32PM -0500, Arvind Sankar wrote:

quoted

Given what Jakub is saying, i.e. it was previously impossible to get
dwarf2 with gcc, and you get dwarf4 whether or not DEBUG_INFO_DWARF4 was

It isn't impossible to get it, -gdwarf-2 works, it is just not a very good
choice (at least unless one knows some debug info consumer is not DWARF3 or
later ready).
Though, even gcc -gdwarf-2 will use many extensions from DWARF3 and later,
as long as there is no way to describe stuff in DWARF2.  -gstrict-dwarf
option requests that no DWARF extensions are used.

Playing with this in godbolt, it looks like the implicit default dwarf
version changed from 2 to 4 in somewhere between the GCC 4.7.4 and
4.8.1 release. The precise version, and whether it was strictly that
version or not doesn't matter much; the minimum supported version of
GCC for building the kernel currently being 4.9 means that without
specifying DEBUG_INFO_DWARF4, that all kernel developers regardless of
toolchain and supported toolchain version have been building as DWARF
v4 (implicitly, or explicitly). DWARF v2 is quite irrelevant then.

Ok, so I think Arvind's suggestion of "make DEBUG_INFO_DWARF4 a menu
option, just don't add a DEBUG_INFO_DWARF2" makes a lot of sense.
Will drop DEBUG_INFO_DWARF2 in v7.
-- 
Thanks,
~Nick Desaulniers