forked from Imagelibrary/binutils-gdb
809c1abc19
GDB has support for many binary file formats, some which might be very
unlikely to be found in some situations (such as the XCOFF format in
an x86 system). This commit introduces the option for a user to choose
which formats GDB will support at build configuration time.
This is especially useful to avoid possible security concerns with
readers that aren't expected to be used at all, as they are one of
the simplest vectors for an attacker to try and hit GDB with. This
change can also reduce the size of the final binary, if that is a
concern.
This commit adds a switch to the configure script allowing a user to
only enable selected file formats, called --enable-binary-file-formats.
The default behavior when the switch is omitted is to compile all file
formats, keeping the original behavior of the script. At the time of
this commit, the valid options for this option are: dbx, coff (which
includes coff-pe), xcoff, mips, elf, macho and all. All is treated
especially, activating all supported readers.
A few targets may require specific binary file format support, as they
directly call functions defined by the file reader. Specifically,
windows targets require coff support, and rs6000 aix and lynx178 targets
require xcoff support. Considering that those formats are the main - or
only - one available in those targets, I believe it makes sense to
re-enable those readers. If that happens, the script will emit the
following warning:
FOO is required to support one or more requested targets. Adding it
Users aren't able to force the disabling of those formats, since GDB
will not compile without those readers. Ideally we'd like to be able
to disable even those formats, in case a user wants to build GDB only
to examine remote files for example, but the current infrastructure
for the file format readers doesn't allow us to do it.
Mach-O and elf support are also dependent on BFD support being compiled
in. In case one of those was requested and BFD does not support them,
the following error is emitted:
FOO was requested, but BFD does not support it.
Finally, this configure switch is also printed by the "show
configuration" command in GDB.
Reviewed-By: Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>
Approved-By: Tom Tromey <tom@tromey.com>
