dwarfexport is an IDA Pro plugin that allows the user to export dwarf debug information. This can then be imported in to gdb and other tools, allowing you to debug using info you have recovered in IDA even when you cannot connect the IDA debugger.

Pre-compiled copies of dwarfexport are available in the bin folder of this project. Just add these files to your IDA plugins folder (plx and plx64 for linux, plw and p64 for windows) and you will have a new option "Edit->Plugins->Export Dwarf Debug Info". Click this and select a folder for the output.

The plugin will generate two files in the output directory. One will be a .c file with the decompiled functions from the Hexrays decompiler. The other is a .dbg file that contains the debug information. Note that because the plugin performs decompilation on every function in the binary, it can take a while to run.

Move these to the device you want to debug on and load gdb (e.x, gdb a.out). You will have full debug information, like normal gdb with source (shown below using TUI mode):

Note: You may need to run list to get the source file loaded.

The following options are available from the plugin GUI

Use Decompiler: On architectures where the decompiler is available, opt out of using it.

Attach Debug Info: When checked, a .dbg file is created with the debug information. However, this will only work if the target is an ELF file. When the target is not an ELF file, uncheck this option to create a group of binary files (one for reach ELF section that would have been created).

dwarfexport depends on the IDA SDK as well as a libdwarf. Once you have these available (a statically compiled copy of libdwarf is provided), you can set the environment variables IDASDK_PATH and IDA_PATH to the SDK path and your IDA folder location respectively. Then build the plugin using make.

No instructions are currently provided. I'm using a series of hacks that I will clean up and document at some point.

There are three functions that need to be modified to add support for a new architectures. They are all located in platform.cpp:

translate_register_num: Translates from IDA register numbers to DWARF numbers. The IDA register numbering can be found by running idaapi.ph_get_regnames(). The index of a register in the returned list is its 'IDA register number'. A variety of resources exist to find the DWARF mapping for a given architecture. For example, wine has the numbers for some architectures (see x86_64_map_dwarf_register).

disassembler_lvar_reg_and_offset: This function should set the reg and offset parameters to a dwarf register and the offset from that register that should be used to read from a stack variable 'member'. So reg will typically be a register containing a pointer to the top or bottom of the stack (so DW_OP_breg5 is register 5 which is EBP on x86), and the offset will then be the offset from the bottom or top of the stack.

decompiler_lvar_reg_and_offset: On architectures supporting the decompiler, this function should be modified to perform the same work as the above function, but with a lvar_t from the Hexrays decompiler. Note that it may be acceptable to reuse the disassembler logic.

dwarfexport is licensed under the terms of the LGPLv2.1. See the LICENSE file for details.