dwarves

dwarves is a set of tools that use the DWARF debugging information inserted in ELF binaries by compilers such as GCC, used by well known debuggers such as GDB, and more recent ones such as systemtap. Utilities in the dwarves suite include pahole, that can be used to find alignment holes in structs and classes in languages such as C, C++, but not limited to these. It also extracts other information such as CPU cacheline alignment, helping pack those structures to achieve more cache hits. A diff like tool, codiff can be used to compare the effects changes in source code generate on the resulting binaries. Another tool is pfunct, that can be used to find all sorts of information about functions, inlines, decisions made by the compiler about inlining, etc.