Presented by

  • Indu Bhagat

    Indu Bhagat

    Indu Bhagat is a part of the Linux Toolchain group at Oracle. In the recent few years, her focus has been on CTF/BTF support in the GNU Toolchain. Previously, she has contributed to the execution framework and C/C++ compiler for a scale-out architecture with MIPs-like ISA for SQL analytics at Oracle.

  • Nick Alcock

    Nick Alcock

    Nick is a free software developer currently working on DTrace, CTF, GNU Binutils, and other toolchainy things at Oracle.

Abstract

CTF (Compact C Type Format) is a debugging format whose main (but not only) purpose is to convey type information of C program constructs. We have added support for CTF to the GNU Toolchain - CTF is now fully supported in GCC, linker (with type deduplication), binary utilities (dumping the contents of .CTF sections in human readable format), a GNU poke description for editing encoded CTF, and GDB. Although the origins of CTF were to convey C type information, CTF format is now open for discussion (on the public mailing list on ctfstd.org) for format changes needed to support the new found use-cases like generation of backtraces and ABI analysis. All this without sacrificing CTF's compactness and simplicity. In this talk we will discuss these and other planned changes for CTF V4. We invite wider community participation in the involved technical discussions via the medium of this talk.