bAutoSaveLoadSymbols is about writing .ppsym files back out and reading them in
again. It had also come to gate reading debug info that's simply sitting next to
the game, which is a different thing and shouldn't need asking for: the main
ELF's own symbols were already loaded unconditionally, but the companion ELF's
symbols and all line info were not.
Now the ELF is always the baseline - main or companion, symbols and line info -
and the setting only adds the .ppsym half on top of it.
Line info also loads from the module being loaded, not just from a companion,
so an ELF launched directly brings its own. A PRX has no .debug section for it
to find (prxgen strips them), so that's a cheap no-op for the usual EBOOT case,
which the companion path still covers.
That second source needs the two shapes distinguished, so AddModule takes an
explicit address delta rather than assuming a base: a companion links at zero
and wants the module's base added, while an ELF loaded at the addresses it asked
for already has final ones (bRelocate is just e_type != ET_EXEC). Rows that
don't land inside the module after that are dropped either way, which is a
better check than the old "offset smaller than the module" one.
Splitting the companion's identity check out of the symbol loader lets line info
reuse it, and drops an accidental requirement along the way: it used to reject
any companion without a symbol table, so an ELF built with -g but stripped of
its symbols would have contributed no line numbers either.
Verified with --auto-save-load-symbols off: CrossCraft's companion app.elf loads
3734 symbols and 98383 line rows where it previously loaded neither.
The direct-ELF path is not verified at runtime - it needs a bootable ELF that
carries DWARF, and there isn't one to hand. Both candidates here (pspautotests'
.elf builds and CrossCraft's own app.elf) are linked at address 0 and fail to
boot on that alone, which is pre-existing loader behaviour and nothing to do
with this.
pspautotests 314/314, UnitTest 55/55.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01GZq8ZtJmFY7bkX5FVkr3P9
Homebrew almost always ships the ELF it was built from alongside the EBOOT -
app.elf next to app.prx - but prxgen strips the symbol table on the way to the
PRX, so the module PPSSPP loads has no names at all and MIPSAnalyst calls every
function it finds z_un_<address>. Working out what any of them are meant hand-
parsing that ELF with a throwaway script, which is how the CrossCraft
relocation bug got identified.
So read it directly. On module load, scan the game's own directory for an ELF
with a symbol table and add its STT_FUNC/STT_OBJECT entries at the module's
base. CrossCraft picks up 3734 symbols, and the disassembly turns from
z_un_088c00f0 into world.init_empty, with static_allocator.alloc at the vtable
entry it calls - the two functions that took the longest to identify by hand.
Matching is the part worth getting right, since a wrong match puts confident
nonsense at real addresses, which beats having no names only in the sense that
it's worse. A candidate has to be a 32-bit ELF with a symbol table whose
highest section ends within a page of the loaded module's size - the companion
links at base 0 and covers the same image, so that's a tight check, and
unrelated ELFs sitting in the same folder fail it. Symbols outside the module
are skipped individually too.
Names go in with updateName, so they win over the analyzer's placeholders
rather than losing to whichever got there first. Gated on the existing
bAutoSaveLoadSymbols setting (off by default), which already means "keep symbol
names around for me" and avoids a directory scan per module load otherwise.
pspautotests 314/314.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01GZq8ZtJmFY7bkX5FVkr3P9
Note that it wasn't tested because all the games I tested had other problems (already implemented modules, encrypted modules, using different functions etc).
But code looks good so it'd probably need few (no?) fixes.
