Re: [PATCH 3/4] gdb: distinguish GNU and MSVC flavors of the Windows OS ABI

[Simon Marchi <simark@simark.ca>]

On 7/15/26 7:18 AM, Pedro Alves wrote:
> On 2026-07-15 02:21, Simon Marchi wrote:
>> On 2026-07-14 18:15, Pedro Alves wrote:
>>> On 2026-07-14 12:57, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
>>> * GDB now distinguishes between the GNU (MinGW) and MSVC Windows ABIs.
>>>
>>>   The "set osabi" command accepts two new values, "Windows-GNU" and
>>>   "Windows-MSVC".  The GNU ABI is for code produced by MinGW
>>>   toolchains, while the MSVC ABI is for code produced by Microsoft's
>>>   MSVC compiler (though see the PDB note below), or Clang targeting
>>>   one of {i686,aarch64,x86_64}-pc-windows-msvc.  The existing
>>>   "Windows" value continues to work and now means "let GDB pick the
>>>   flavor": GDB uses the configured default OS ABI (from --target) when
>>>   that is a Windows flavor, and otherwise assumes the GNU flavor.  For
>>>   example, --target=x86_64-pc-windows-msvc defaults to the MSVC ABI,
>>>   and --target=x86_64-w64-mingw32 defaults to GNU ABI.  Similarly for
>>>   the i686 and AArch64 variants.  See "New targets" entry below.
>>
>> What happens if you build a GDB with --enable-targets=all and load a
>> .exe?  Is either ABI preferred over the other?  
> 
> The preferred one is taken out of --target, defaults to GNU.
> --enable-targets=foo,bar,all does not affect it.

I was thinking when building GDB on Linux (with --target that defaults
to something Linux) with --enable-targets=all, i.e. a typical
development build.  In that case, the --target does not help to choose
an ABI, so the fallback must come from somewhere else.


Simon