[Dwarf-Discuss] Register kinds

[Bishop, John E]

John DelSignore:

> The key here is that the debugger must use a runtime mapping from 
> the register number "cookie" that's dropped into the DWARF to the real
> hardware register number. In fact, at runtime, the cookie might map to
> a hardware register, a memory address, or nowhere,...

This is apparently the province of the "ABI" for the platform concerned.

I never did find a document which claimed to be "The ABI" for my platform
but luckily there was a ".h" file shared between the compiler team and
the debugger team which included an enumeration of register names.  Both
sides thus knew what hardware register was represented by a particular
integer in the DWARF.

It's not elegant but it worked for us.  Unfortunately, if you don't have
both sides in one company I guess you have to either find an ABI document
or do experiments to see what the compiler issues or what the debugger
accepts.

           -John