CFI directives

CFI support for GNU assembler (GAS)

Modern ABIs don't require frame pointers to be used in functions. However missing FPs bring difficulties when doing a backtrace. One solution is to provide Dwarf-2 CFI data for each such function. This can be easily done for example by GCC in it's output, but isn't that easy to write by hand for pure assembler functions.

With the help of these .cfi_* directives one can add appropriate unwind info into his asm source without too much trouble.

Directives implemented so far:

.cfi_startproc

Use at the beginning of each function. It initializes some internal data structures and emits initial CFI instructions.

.cfi_endproc

Opens .eh_frame, generates appropriate binary structures (CIE, FDE) and sets up relocation records.

.cfi_def_cfa  reg, imm

Set a rule for computing CFA to: take content of register  reg and add  imm to it.

.cfi_def_cfa_register  reg

Change rule for CFA to use  reg. Offset remains the same.

.cfi_def_cfa_offset  imm

Change rule for CFA to use offset  imm. Register remains the same.

.cfi_adjust_cfa_offset  imm

Like the previous one but  imm is a relative value that will be added to current offset instead of an absolute value as in .cfi_def_cfa_offset.

.cfi_offset  reg, imm

Generate a rule saying that register  reg is saved at offset  imm from CFA.

I've got a feeling it stands for Call Frame Information and is a GNU AS extension to manage call frames. From DeveloperWorks:

On some architectures, exception handling must be managed with Call Frame Information directives. These directives are used in the assembly to direct exception handling. These directives are available on Linux on POWER, if, for any reason (portability of the code base, for example), the GCC generated exception handling information is not sufficient.

To disable these, use the gcc option

-fno-asynchronous-unwind-tables