Always remote: [WIP/RFC] MIPS registers overhaul

Andrew Cagney
2003-05-20T20:18:05Z

>> Another one (and it's a doozie) is that thread debugging won't work
>> due to the ABI specific libthread_db.so library that's dlopen'd by
>> RDA. A native GDB (assuming that we did the necessary work to port it
>> to mips64-linux) would have the same problem. We've kicked around
>> some ideas for fixing this problem in the past. The only idea that
>> I've found compelling is from Alex Oliva (and perhaps others) who
>> suggested that it may be best for a "native" gdb to spawn an
>> ABI-specific rda or gdbserver and connect to it automatically.
>
>
> TBH, I'd rather like to see us develop an extended and more extensible
> remote protocol (on any number of people's TODO lists already!) and do
> _all_ native debugging this way.

FYI, one of the long ago identified scalability problems (by HP) with
GDB was all the memory moving/sucking that it did. HP were looking for
ways to MMAP memory and avoiding doing all the copies. Having GDB suck
memory through a straw would be a odds with that.

Note, I'm talking here about megabytes of memory - people try to use the
debuger to draw plots of their fortran arrays.

Andrew