I am developing 8051 firmware in a project and have to use IAR as the toolchain. The build system is CMake. I cannot use the IAR IDE.
In order to optimize my source code I want to look at the disassembly of the resulting binary, preferably with labels. Is there any way to make xlink output something that I can analyse? I know that the IAR IDE debugger has a debug view, but I cannot use the IDE. It seems xlink can output a lot of file formats, but which ones allow to extract debug information on command line?
The linker is commonly not the tool to produce assembly listings. It generally only knows of bytes, sections, references to be resolved, addresses to be located, output formats to generate, and so on. Only few linkers know how to patch compiler/assembler generated listings with the final addresses.
So you would need to look at the tool that knows about machine code, the compiler or the assembler. Unfortunately IAR does not seem to provide a disassembler.
A quick web research on "iar 8051 compiler option" revealed this compiler guide. And another quick look in the table of contents led to the chapter "Descriptions of compiler options", which describes among others the option -l. The guide says:
Use this option to generate an assembler or C/C++ listing to a file. Note that this option can be used one or more times on the command line.
This should be enough to see the generated assembly. If you want the allocated addresses after linking, the linker can provide that.
Anyway, as a last resort you would like to check out decent disassemblers like Ghidra.