binsize

Binsize tool

Tool for analyzing the sizes of symbols in binaries.

It can be used to find out which symbols are taking up the most space in a binary.

It requires bloaty and nm tools to be installed.

It analyzes the .elf file and optionally also the .map file from the binary creation process.

Tool basic usage

Installable by pip install binsize - see PyPI.

Installing this package creates binsize command, which has a lot of subcommands seeable by binsize --help. For example

$ binsize get firmware.elf -d
$ binsize compare firmware.elf other_firmware.elf
$ binsize tree firmware.elf

--help can be used even on the subcommands, for example binsize get --help - to see all available options.

Result will be usually printed into terminal, unless specifying --output option which some commands support.

Setting root directory

To resolve all the files properly, the project's root directory needs to be set correctly.

There are couple of possibilities how to do it.

In the end, all of them are changing the root value in settings.json, from where everything else gets the value. It needs to be an absolute path.

settings.json will be created in a user's home directory, based on platformdirs library (~/.config/binsize/settings.json on linux).

Manually

Just modifying the root in the settings.json file.

Via environmental variable

BINSIZE_ROOT_DIR env variable is checked and when not empty, it will set the root directory.

e.g. BINSIZE_ROOT_DIR=/home/user/project binsize tree /path/to/file.elf

Via CLI argument

binsize accepts -r / --root-dir argument, which can be used to set the root directory.

It has lower priority than the environmental variable.

e.g. binsize -r /home/user/project tree /path/to/file.elf

Via exposed function

binsize exposes set_root_dir function, which can be called from any python script.

e.g. binsize.set_root_dir("/home/user/project")

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TODO: document all the CLI commands, exportable symbols, basic functioning, ways to extend it, etc.