Re: bfd_find_nearest_line failure with COFF unsorted line number information

[Nick Clifton]

Hi Chris,

> I've built binutils-2.13.2 on a power3 machine with AIX 5.1.  I've
> noticed that addr2line and calls to bfd_find_nearest_line fail in
> some cases with applications compiled with IBM VA Fortran compilers
> versions 7.1 and 8.1.
>
> It looks like the coff_find_nearest_line function in bfd/coffgen.c
> is expecting line number information to be sorted by address.  In
> the case of these two compilers, I'm seeing line number information
> that is not sorted.
>
> I made the following naive change which seemed to address the
> problem.

Thank you for reporting this problem.

I am not sure that your solution is the best one however, since in the
majority of cases, with correct compilers producing sorted linenumber
information, the patch will mean a significant slowdown in the time it
takes to lookup line numbers.

A better solution I think would be to add support for a target
specific line number lookup function which, if provided by the target,
would be called before the generic code.  This function could be
defined for AIX 5.1 systems and would handle the unsorted linenumber
information that their Fortran compilers produce.

Would you like to consider making a patch like this instead ?

There is another problem as well, which is that you do not have an FSF
binutils copyright assignment on file.  Without such an assignment we
cannot accept patches from you, much as we might like to.  In case you
do wish to continue looking into this problem, I am attaching a
copyright assignment request form at the end of this email.

Cheers
        Nick

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