I'm asking this because I've been given a task which I don't yet know how to handle. You see, we're in a situation where we can execute legacy a.out programs on a virtual machine running a really old linux kernel. We would like the native MinGW gdb to debug the program somehow. It's been proposed that we convert the a.out file into a PE file containing debug symbols and send it to GDB to process, while actually running the UNIX a.out file on the virtual machine. The only available debug symbols that comes with the a.out file is STABS, since the version of GCC used on the VM is very old.
I understand that it's possible to add STABS debug information into a PE file. GCC does it, and I've done experiments with objdump and gdb comprehensively enough to come to to the conclusion that STABS works with MinGW GDB. So how do I achieve it? How did GCC approach it?
Thank you.