DWARF (short for Debug With Arbitrary Record Format although rarely seen that way) is a widely used, standardized debugging data format .

DWARF was originally introduced along with ELF. It proved to be excessively voluminous, and it was superseded by an incompatible successor DWARF-2, which added various encoding schemes to reduce data size.

DWARF was not immediately successful; for instance, when Sun Microsystems adopted ELF as part of their move to Solaris, they opted to continue using stabs , in an embedding known as stabs-in-elf . Linux followed suit, and DWARF-2 did not become the default until the late 1990s.

External link

• http://dwarf.freestandards.org
• http://www.arm.com/pdfs/TIS-DWARF2.pdf