DWARF with dSYM debug informationEdit

Created 8/16/2006, updated 3/12/2024

DWARF with dSYM and stripping

I made a small test project, a foundation tool, to find out what the differences are between a DWARF and a "DWARF with dSYM" build. It appears that the build process is identical (same arguments passed to compiler and linker) but in the case of the dSYM variant an additional, final step is performed:

GenerateDSYMFile
    cd /tmp/dynamic
    /usr/bin/dsymutil -o /Users/wincent/trabajo/build/Release/dynamic.dSYM /Users/wincent/trabajo/build/Release/dynamic

Or for an application target:

GenerateDSYMFile
    cd /tmp/dynamic
    /usr/bin/dsymutil -o /Users/wincent/trabajo/build/Release/dynamic.app.dSYM /Users/wincent/trabajo/build/Release/dynamic.app/Contents/MacOS/dynamic

The dsymutil utility is also mentioned here:

http://developer.apple.com/releasenotes/DeveloperTools/GDB.html

And there is a manpage for it:

man dsymutil

So it looks like a possible workaround for the ordering issue described here is to manually add a separate shell script build phase that produces the dSYM file prior to stripping rather than activating the "DWARF with dSYM" build setting.

Address to symbol translation

It is not necessary to keep the original executable. GDB can be used as described here:

http://lists.apple.com/archives/Xcode-users/2006/May/msg00856.html

dSYM information for multi-component products

Separate dSYM bundles must be kept for each component.

Components that may be loaded into memory at different locations (bundles, for example) will need to have their offsets taken into account when trying to convert addresses to symbols (no different than current atos usage).

Deciphering dSYM information for other architectures

The only Apple tool that can parse the dSYM format is GDB. You can select the appropriate variant by running one of the following instead of gdb:

/usr/libexec/gdb/gdb-powerpc-apple-darwin
/usr/libexec/gdb/gdb-i386-apple-darwin

atosym

While waiting for Apple to update atos(1) to work with dSYM files I've thrown together a quick tool to serve as a temporary substitute.

See: http://wincent.dev/a/products/atosym/

Checkout via svn

svn co svn://wincent.dev/atosym/trunk

Export and zip downloadable version

svn export svn://wincent.dev/atosym/trunk atosym-1.0
zip -r atosym-1.0.zip atosym-1.0