cargo-binutils

Cargo subcommands to invoke the LLVM tools shipped with the Rust toolchain

NOTE This is not an official Rust project.

This project is developed and maintained by the Embedded WG Tools team.

Features

• All Rust symbols in the output of the LLVM tools are automatically demangled.
• No need to pass the path to the artifact as an argument if using the tool in "build and inspect" mode.

Installation

$ cargo install cargo-binutils

$ rustup component add llvm-tools

Usage

This:

$ rust-$tool ${args[@]}

is basically sugar for:

$ $(find $(rustc --print sysroot) -name llvm-$tool) ${args[@]}

Apart from these rust-* tools, which are direct proxies for the llvm tools in the llvm-tools component, the crate also provides some Cargo subcommands that will first build the project and then run the llvm tool on the output artifact. This:

$ cargo size --example foo

is sugar for:

$ cargo build --example foo
$ rust-size target/examples/foo

These commands take similar options to cargo build and you can specify a specific binary with --bin NAME, an example with --example NAME or the default binary by not passing --bin or --example.

In the case of cargo-objdump the architecture of the compilation target is passed as -arch-name=$target to llvm-objdump. -arch-name specifies to which architecture disassemble the object file to.

You can get more information about the CLI of each tool by running rust-$tool -help.

All the Cargo subcommands accept a --verbose / -v flag. In verbose mode the rust-$tool invocation will be printed to stderr.

Build and inspect mode: Some subcommands accept the flags: --bin, --example, --lib, --target and --release. These can be used to make the subcommand first build the respective binary, example or library and have the path to the artifact be automatically passed to the LLVM tool. This mode only works when the subcommand is used from within a Cargo project.

Disclaimer Note that cargo-binutils simply proxies the LLVM tools in the llvm-tools component and the Rust project makes no guarantee about the availability and the CLI of these tools -- i.e. the availability and CLI of these tools may change as new Rust releases are made.

Examples

nm

List all symbols in an executable

$ cargo nm --release
0800040a T BusFault
0800040a T DebugMonitor
0800040a T DefaultHandler
0800065e T HardFault
0800040a T MemoryManagement
0800040a T NonMaskableInt
0800040a T PendSV
0800040c T Reset
0800040a T SVCall
0800040a T SysTick
0800040a T UsageFault
08000408 T UserHardFault
08000008 R __EXCEPTIONS
08000040 R __INTERRUPTS
08000004 R __RESET_VECTOR
08000000 R __STACK_START

List all symbols in an executable sorted by size (smallest first).

$ cargo nm --release -- --print-size --size-sort
0800040a 00000002 T DefaultHandler
08000408 00000002 T UserHardFault
08000004 00000004 R __RESET_VECTOR
08000400 00000008 T main
08000008 00000038 R __EXCEPTIONS
0800040c 00000252 T Reset
08000040 000003c0 R __INTERRUPTS

objcopy

Transform the output of Cargo (ELF) into binary format.

$ cargo objcopy --release -- -O binary app.bin

$ stat --printf="%s\n" app.bin
1642

objdump

Disassemble a binary.

$ cargo objdump --release -- --disassemble --no-show-raw-insn
target/thumbv7m-none-eabi/debug/app:    file format ELF32-arm-little

Disassembly of section .text:
main:
 8000400:       push    {r7, lr}
 8000402:       bl      #608
 8000406:       b       #-8 <main+0x2>

UserHardFault:
 8000408:       trap

UsageFault:
 800040a:       trap

Reset:
 800040c:       push.w  {r4, r5, r6, r7, r8, lr}
 8000410:       movw    r0, #0
 8000414:       movw    r2, #0
 8000418:       movt    r0, #8192
 800041c:       movt    r2, #8192
(..)

size

Print binary size in System V format

$ cargo size --release -- -A -x
target/thumbv7m-none-eabi/release/app  :
section               size         addr
.vector_table        0x400    0x8000000
.text                0x26a    0x8000400
.rodata                0x2    0x800066a
.data                    0   0x20000000
.bss                     0   0x20000000
.debug_str          0x107e            0
.debug_loc           0x3e2            0
.debug_abbrev        0x31b            0
.debug_info         0x19f9            0
.debug_ranges         0xe8            0
.debug_macinfo         0x1            0
.debug_pubnames      0x9ff            0
.debug_pubtypes      0x8dd            0
.ARM.attributes       0x2e            0
.debug_frame          0x6c            0
.debug_line          0x69b            0
.debug_aranges        0x40            0
Total               0x531a

strip

Strip all symbols from the build artifact

$ stat --printf="%s\n" target/release/hello
4094240

$ cargo-strip --release -- --strip-all -o smaller-hello

$ stat --printf="%s\n" smaller-hello
424432

rust-lld

Provides a link to lld. Used to change the linker or providing a workaround if -C linker-flavor is not doing the job.

.cargo/config

[target.wasm32-unknown-unknown]
linker = "rust-lld"

Minimum Supported Rust Version (MSRV)

This crate is guaranteed to compile on stable Rust 1.70.0 and up.

License

Licensed under either of

• Apache License, Version 2.0 (LICENSE-APACHE or http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0)
• MIT license (LICENSE-MIT or http://opensource.org/licenses/MIT)

at your option.

Contribution

Unless you explicitly state otherwise, any contribution intentionally submitted for inclusion in the work by you, as defined in the Apache-2.0 license, shall be dual licensed as above, without any additional terms or conditions.

Code of Conduct

Contribution to this crate is organized under the terms of the Rust Code of Conduct, the maintainer of this crate, the Embedded WG Tools team, promises to intervene to uphold that code of conduct.