Hello, > There is a large number of developers who build software for ELF-based > embedded systems on windows and test/debug/profile/deploy it over some > network or USB connection. Those people want to have elfutils for their > debugging and profiling. They want to use elfutils on the host (the windows > box) because that is much faster.
This is also our use case. I support developers that use Windows on their host PC to develop Embedded Linux applications. Iām currently exploring options to provide Windows users the same development tooling to use GDB with Debuginfod for them to be able to debug Embedded Linux applications. > Those people are not me and I'm not talking about sanity. Likewise š > > And why aren't people simply using cygwin for such a port? > > If we built perfparser with cygwin, the people who use it would also need > cygwin. People building embedded devices generally have a colorful mess of > different tools, none of which you can rely on in advance. I haven't > considered shipping cygwin with perfparser. Is that actually possible? It > looks > like it needs some installation procedure I would have to burden the user > with. I would prefer to use MinGW instead of Cygwin. For some extra context, we use the Yocto Project to build our Embedded Linux images, which can provide a cross compiler toolchain and other host development tools for Windows using MinGW. The Yocto Project has added a distribution feature to enable Debuginfod support for developers. https://elinux.org/images/d/d4/005-1400-SLIDES-using_debuginfod_with_the_yocto_project.pdf This feature is now enabled by default. The feature compiles Elfutils and GDB with Debuginfod support enabled. Additionally, there's tooling to easily stand up a local Debuginfod server that hosts the RPM/DEB/IPK packages built by Yocto. Unfortunately, due to Elfutils being unable to be built with MinGW, the Debuginfod distribution feature is prevented from being enabled for the Windows SDK. If MinGW support was added to Elfutils, I could submit a patch to the Yocto Project to allow the distribution feature to be used for the Windows SDK. This would likely be helpful for others in the community. > > But if there is consensus (among the Windows hackers) about using one > > common target for the port then maybe we should have an official > > branch on sourceware? > > Such a thing would certainly be welcome from my point of view! If support cannot be added to the main branch, this sounds like an acceptable option to me. Best regards, Colin
