tl;dr See D81784 for the 'tombstone value' concept. This patch changes our behavior to be almost the same as GNU ld (except that we also use 1 for .debug_loc):
* .debug_ranges & .debug_loc: 1 (LLD<11: 0+addend; GNU ld uses 1 for .debug_ranges)
* .debug_*: 0 (LLD<11: 0+addend; GNU ld uses 0; future LLD: -1)
We make the tweaks because:
1) The new tombstone is novel and needs more time to be adopted by consumers before it's the default.
2) The old (gold) strategy had problems with zero-length functions - so rather than going back that, we're going to the GNU ld strategy which doesn't have that problem.
3) One slight tweak to (2) is to apply the .debug_ranges workaround to .debug_loc for the same reasons it applies to debug_ranges - to avoid terminating lists early.
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http://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm-dev/2020-July/143482.html
The tombstone value -1 in .debug_line caused problems to lldb (fixed by D83957;
will be included in 11.0.0) and breakpad (fixed by
https://crrev.com/c/2321300). It may potentially affects other DWARF consumers.
For .debug_ranges & .debug_loc: 1, an argument preferring 1 (GNU ld for .debug_ranges) over -2 is that:
```
{-1, -2} <<< base address selection entry
{0, length} <<< address range
```
may create a situation where low_pc is greater than high_pc. So we use
1, the GNU ld behavior for .debug_ranges
For other .debug_* sections, there haven't been many reports. One issue is that
bloaty (src/dwarf.cc) can incorrectly count address ranges in .debug_ranges . To
reduce similar disruption, this patch changes the tombstone values to be similar to GNU ld.
This does mean another behavior change to the default trunk behavior. Sorry
about it. The default trunk behavior will be similar to release/11.x while we work on a transition plan for LLD users.
Reviewed By: dblaikie, echristo
Differential Revision: https://reviews.llvm.org/D84825
... to customize the tombstone value we use for an absolute relocation
referencing a discarded symbol. This can be used as a workaround when
some debug processing tool has trouble with current -1 tombstone value
(https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=1102223#c11 )
For example, to get the current built-in rules (not considering the .debug_line special case for ICF):
```
-z dead-reloc-in-nonalloc='.debug_*=0xffffffffffffffff'
-z dead-reloc-in-nonalloc=.debug_loc=0xfffffffffffffffe
-z dead-reloc-in-nonalloc=.debug_ranges=0xfffffffffffffffe
```
To get GNU ld (as of binutils 2.35)'s behavior:
```
-z dead-reloc-in-nonalloc='*=0'
-z dead-reloc-in-nonalloc=.debug_ranges=1
```
This option has other use cases. For example, if we want to check
whether a non-SHF_ALLOC section has dead relocations.
With this patch, we can run a regular LLD and run another with a special
-z dead-reloc-in-nonalloc=, then compare their output.
Reviewed By: thakis
Differential Revision: https://reviews.llvm.org/D83264
Fangrui Song