Re: [remote protocol] support for disabling packet acknowledgement

[Sandra Loosemore <sandra@codesourcery.com>]

Eli Zaretskii wrote:
>> Date: Thu, 10 Jul 2008 14:57:14 -0400
>> From: Sandra Loosemore <sandra@codesourcery.com>
>> CC:  gdb@sourceware.org,  gdb-patches@sourceware.org,   Pedro Alves <pedro@codesourcery.com>
>>
>> Paul Koning wrote:
>>
>>> I'm not sure this is a good idea.
>>>
>>> For one thing, if you want to work on performance, there are much more
>>> dramatic changes to the protocol that could be done that would help
>>> much more.  I can't believe that the cost of acks is significant
>>> compared to all the other bottlenecks.
>> You'll note the documentation says turning off acks may be desirable to reduce 
>> communication overhead *or* "for other reasons".  In fact, it is the "other 
>> reasons" that motivated this patch.  We are working on designing the extensions 
>> to the remote protocol to support nonstop mode, and we realized that we simply 
>> cannot do it in combination with using +/- acks on the asynchronous responses.
> 
> Then please just say so in the docs.

As you'll note from subsequent discussion, we decided to use another mechanism 
for non-stop mode, so it has no dependence on the noack mode patch any more. 
I'm not sure what else you think the docs for noack mode should say?

Incidentally, I am working on docs for non-stop mode now -- both the user-level 
changes, and the remote protocol pieces.

-Sandra