For vmlinux built with clang thin-lto or lto for latest bpf-next, there exist cross cu debuginfo type references. For example, compile unit 1: tag 10: type A compile unit 2: ... refer to type A (tag 10 in compile unit 1) I only checked a few but have seen type A may be a simple type like "unsigned char" or a complex type like an array of base types. I am using latest llvm trunk and bpf-next. I suspect llvm12 or linus tree >= 5.12 rc2 should be able to exhibit the issue as well. Both thin-lto and lto have the same issues. Current pahole cannot handle this. It will report types cannot be found error. Bill Wendling has attempted to fix the issue with [1] by permitting all tags/types are hashed to the same hash table and then process cu's one by one. This does not really work. The reason is that each cu resolves types locally so for the above example we may have compile unit 1: type A : type_id = 10 compile unit 2: refer to type A : type A will be resolved as type id = 10 But id 10 refers to compile unit 1, we will get either out of bound type id or incorrect one. This patch set is a continuation of Bill's work. We still increase the hashtable size and traverse all cu's before recoding and finalization. But instead of creating one-to-one mapping between debuginfo cu and pahole cu, we just create one pahole cu, which should solve the above incorrect type id issue. Patches #1 and #2 are refactoring the existing code and Patch #3 added an option "merge_cus" to permit merging all debuginfo cu's into one pahole cu. For vmlinux built, it can be detected that if LTO or Thin-LTO is enabled, "merge_cus" can be added into pahole command line. [1] https://www.spinics.net/lists/dwarves/msg00999.html Yonghong Song (3): dwarf_loader: permits flexible HASHTAGS__BITS dwarf_loader: factor out common code to initialize a cu dwarf_loader: add option to merge more dwarf cu's into one pahole cu dwarf_loader.c | 179 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++---------- dwarves.h | 2 + pahole.c | 8 +++ 3 files changed, 155 insertions(+), 34 deletions(-) -- 2.30.2