ctfconvert dependency...

[Marius Nünnerich]

2010/3/11 "C. Bergström" <cbergstrom at pathscale.com>:
> Shrikanth Kamath wrote:
>>
>> Just trying to understand the build dependency for ctfconvert...
>>
>> I see ctfconvert (cddl/usr.bin/ctfconvert/)  has dependency on libctf.a
>> (cddl/lib/libctf/)
>>
>> Now the snippet in bsd.lib.mk has this check for various target suffixes,
>>
>> .c.So:
>> .if defined(CTFCONVERT)
>>        ${CTFCONVERT} ${CTFFLAGS} ${.TARGET}
>> .endif
>>
>> and sys.mk
>>
>> .c
>> .if defined(CTFCONVERT)
>>        ${CTFCONVERT} ${CTFFLAGS} ${.TARGET}
>> .endif
>>
>> My query, libctf includes  <bsd.lib.mk> in it's Makefile, so will the
>> above
>> not try to
>> run 'ctfconvert' on libctf itself?
>>
>
> I'm going to make some assumptions and go out on a limb here..
>
> The CDDL code in FBSD came from OpenSolaris (specifically onnv-gate hg repo)
>  When OpenSolaris is built they convert stab debugging information over to
> CTF (compressed text format?).  This is done so that they can have debugging
> information, but without the overhead of stab (or dwarf2).  I don't know how
> much of the original onnv-gate Makefiles came over from OpenSolaris, but
> assuming the FBSD kernel doesn't need/use CTF format this dependency can and
> probably should go away.  (Only (k)mdb supports CTF that I'm aware of?)
>
> Hopefully this is useful information and I'm not too wrong or someone will
> correct me

The CTF information is needed by DTrace.
My guess is that it will run ctfconvert on itself so it should be
there from a prior install or it is part of some early toolchain
stuff.