Chapter 13. Debugging Programs That Use Overlays

If your program is too large to fit completely in your target system's memory, you can sometimes use overlays to work around this problem. gdb provides some support for debugging programs that use overlays.

13.1. How Overlays Work

Suppose you have a computer whose instruction address space is only 64 kilobytes long, but which has much more memory which can be accessed by other means: special instructions, segment registers, or memory management hardware, for example. Suppose further that you want to adapt a program which is larger than 64 kilobytes to run on this system.

One solution is to identify modules of your program which are relatively independent, and need not call each other directly; call these modules overlays. Separate the overlays from the main program, and place their machine code in the larger memory. Place your main program in instruction memory, but leave at least enough space there to hold the largest overlay as well.

Now, to call a function located in an overlay, you must first copy that overlay's machine code from the large memory into the space set aside for it in the instruction memory, and then jump to its entry point there.

    Data             Instruction            Larger
Address Space       Address Space        Address Space
+-----------+       +-----------+        +-----------+
|           |       |           |        |           |
+-----------+       +-----------+        +-----------+<-- overlay 1
| program   |       |   main    |   .----| overlay 1 | load address
| variables |       |  program  |   |    +-----------+
| and heap  |       |           |   |    |           |
+-----------+       |           |   |    +-----------+<-- overlay 2
|           |       +-----------+   |    |           | load address
+-----------+       |           |   |  .-| overlay 2 |
                    |           |   |  | |           |
         mapped --->+-----------+   |  | +-----------+
         address    |           |   |  | |           |
                    |  overlay  | <-'  | |           |
                    |   area    |  <---' +-----------+<-- overlay 3
                    |           | <---.  |           | load address
                    +-----------+     `--| overlay 3 |
                    |           |        |           |
                    +-----------+        |           |
                                         +-----------+
                                         |           |
                                         +-----------+

                    A code overlay
     

The diagram above shows a system with separate data and instruction address spaces. To map an overlay, the program copies its code from the larger address space to the instruction address space. Since the overlays shown here all use the same mapped address, only one may be mapped at a time. For a system with a single address space for data and instructions, the diagram would be similar, except that the program variables and heap would share an address space with the main program and the overlay area.

An overlay loaded into instruction memory and ready for use is called a mapped overlay; its mapped address is its address in the instruction memory. An overlay not present (or only partially present) in instruction memory is called unmapped; its load address is its address in the larger memory. The mapped address is also called the virtual memory address, or VMA; the load address is also called the load memory address, or LMA.

Unfortunately, overlays are not a completely transparent way to adapt a program to limited instruction memory. They introduce a new set of global constraints you must keep in mind as you design your program:

The overlay system described above is rather simple, and could be improved in many ways: