Libelfin is a from-scratch
C++11 library for reading ELF binaries and DWARFv4 debug information.
Quick start
make, and optionally make install. You'll need GCC 4.7 or later.
Features
-
Native C++11 code and interface, designed from scratch to interact
well with C++11 features, from range-based for loops to move
semantics to enum classes. -
Libelfin fully implements parsing for Debugging Information Entries
(DIEs), the core data structure used by the DWARF format, as well as
most DWARFv4 tables. -
Supports all DWARFv4 DIE value types except location lists and
macros. -
Nearly complete evaluator for DWARFv4 expressions and location
descriptions. -
Complete interpreter for DWARFv4 line tables.
-
Iterators for easily and naturally traversing compilation units,
type units, DIE trees, and DIE attribute lists. -
Every enum value can be pretty-printed.
-
Large collection of type-safe DIE attribute fetchers.
Non-features
Libelfin implements a syntactic layer for DWARF and ELF, but not a
semantic layer. Interpreting the information stored in DWARF DIE
trees still requires a great deal of understanding of DWARF, but
libelfin will make sense of the bytes for you.
Using libelfin
To build against libdwarf++, use, for example
g++ -std=c++11 a.cc $(pkg-config --cflags --libs libdwarf++)
To use a local build of libelfin, set PKG_CONFIG_PATH. For example,
export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=$PWD/elf:$PWD/dwarf
There are various example programs in examples/.
Status
Libelfin is a good start. It's not production-ready and there are
many parts of the DWARF specification it does not yet implement, but
it's complete enough to be useful for many things and is a good deal
more pleasant to use than every other debug info library I've tried.