Hello,

On Wed, 14 Sep 2022, Peter Zijlstra wrote:

quoted

Maybe this is semantics, but I wouldn't characterize objtool's existence
as being based on the mistrust of tools.  It's main motivation is to
fill in the toolchain's blind spots in asm and inline-asm, which exist
by design.

That and a fairly deep seated loathing for the regular CFI annotations
and DWARF in general. Linus was fairly firm he didn't want anything to
do with DWARF for in-kernel unwinding.

I was referring only to the check-stuff functionality of objtool, not to 
its other parts.  Altough, of course, "deep seated loathing" is a special 
form of mistrust as well ;-)

That left us in a spot that we needed unwind information in a 'better'
format than DWARF.

Objtool was born out of those contraints. ORC not needing the CFI
annotations and ORC being *much* faster at unwiding and generation
(debug builds are slow) were all good.

Don't mix DWARF debug info with DWARF-based unwinding info, the latter 
doesn't imply the former.  Out of interest: how does ORC get around the 
need for CFI annotations (or equivalents to restore registers) and what 
makes it fast?  I want faster unwinding for DWARF as well, when there's 
feature parity :-)  Maybe something can be learned for integration into 
dwarf-unwind.


Ciao,
Michael.