Re: [PATCH]: Make Linux use the new unified x86 watchpoint support

[Mark Kettenis <kettenis@wins.uva.nl>]

   Date: Tue, 27 Mar 2001 08:51:10 -0800
   From: Michael Snyder <msnyder@redhat.com>

   Mark Kettenis wrote:
   > 
   >    Date: Tue, 27 Mar 2001 08:55:00 +0200 (IST)
   >    From: Eli Zaretskii <eliz@is.elta.co.il>
   > 
   >    On Mon, 26 Mar 2001, Michael Snyder wrote:
   > 
   >    > Guys, this implementation has problems.  You have it hard-coded
   >    > so that on a linux host, it unconditionally calls native linux
   >    > methods involving ptrace to get the debug registers.  This breaks
   >    > very badly if you're using a native linux host to debug a remote
   >    > i386 target.
   > 
   > Just like the old implementation.  I suspect the old implementation
   > just happened to work because it didn't do any strict error checking.

   No, you're on the wrong track.  I haven't looked at how the old
   implementation worked, but the problem with the new implementation
   is _not_ the perror call.  It's the ptrace call that preceeds it.
   You can't call ptrace if the process you're debugging is remote.

Did you actually try my patch?  I just did, using gdbserver (which by
the way needs some fixing for Linux/x86, I'll see what I can do), and
it seems to fix the problems for me.  Note that it isn't really a
problem to call ptrace if the process you're debugging is remote.
You'll just call ptrace on untraced (and possibly non-existing)
process, and it will fail with ESRCH.

   > The fundamental problem is that the watpoint-stuff isn't part of the
   > target vector.

   Yes, you're absolutely right about this.  This is why I don't
   like ptrace calls being made from outside of the target vector.

Me neither, but this seems a reasonable temporary workaround for the
problem, especially since GDB has been doing something similar for
quite some time.

Mark