Event

<p>Version 6 of the DWARF debugging information format is still a work in progress, with many changes already accepted. This talk will focus on one fundamental change that has been accepted recently: "<a href="https://dwarfstd.org/issues/230524.1.html">Issue 230524.1</a>", also known as "Location Descriptions on the DWARF Stack".</p> <p>The compiler can emit small programs in a bytecode known as DWARF expressions that a consumer (usually a debugger) can evaluate in order to compute an object's location; where in memory or registers it has been placed. Up until DWARF-5, the execution model of such DWARF expressions was not expressive enough to describe how objects are placed on GPUs, or even on CPUs in some cases too. DWARF 6 addresses this by making DWARF locations regular stack elements on the DWARF expression evaluation stack, which has many interesting cascading consequences, including enabling expressiveness, factorization, and more.</p> <p>In this presentation, we will discuss the execution model of DWARF expressions, the proposed changes and follow-up extensions this change enables.</p>