Re: [RFA] set/show enable-software-singlestep

[Joel Brobecker <brobecker@adacore.com>]

> I'm just curious about it,

Sure :).

> I can't figure which targets are used in Tru64.  Is it ptrace based?

Actually, I think it's procfs.

> From your description of not being able to hw singlestep
> threaded programs, I take it threads are user space?

Yes (DEC threads).

> I'm thinking what we want is the other way around.  Can the target
> singlestep itself?  Software-singlestepping with breakpoints is the
> current fallback mechanism.

Ideally, yes. We would like the debugger to automatically detect
whether software single-step is needed or not. The user-setting
is interesting for the cases when this detection is not implemented.
However, I won't argue that the change is so interesting that the
user setting must be checked in now so that we have early access
to it. I'm equally content to NOT have a user setting and let GDB
continue to use s/w single-step by default on Tru64.

> Is there a thread_stratum target used to implement the thread support?

Right now, no. As it turns out, however, it just happens that I
implemented this thread layer for dec-threads a two or three weeks ago.
It's ready to be submitted, but I did the work as quickly as possible
(for internal reasons) and so it seems to work, but I sometimes I have
this uneasy feeling that it's too simplistic.  So I want to give it
a little bit more testing, to see if I can avoid embarrassing myself
with silly code :). Not that it would be the first time, really...

-- 
Joel