On 02/22/2012 01:26 AM, Pedro Alves wrote:
> On 02/20/2012 02:40 AM, Yao Qi wrote:
> 
>> -When GDB is debugging a remote target, the GDB @dfn{agent} code running
>> +Although called @dfn{agent expression}, because they originally
>> +referred to the in-process agent (@pxref{In-Process Agent}), these
> 
> That's incorrect.  Agent expressions existed long before the in-process
> agent was invented.  See the confusion about calling the new IPA thing
> just "agent"?
> 

I didn't realize "agent" was introduced back in 1999, long before IPA
was created.

> From agentexpr.texi:
> 
>  When GDB is debugging a remote target, the GDB @dfn{agent} code running
>  on the target computes the values of the expressions itself.  To avoid
>  having a full symbolic expression evaluator on the agent, GDB translates
>  expressions in the source language into a simpler bytecode language, and
>  then sends the bytecode to the agent; the agent then executes the
>  bytecode, and records the values for GDB to retrieve later.
>                                                  (...) The interpreter is
>  small, and strict limits on the memory and time required to evaluate an
>  expression are easy to determine, making it suitable for use by the
>  debugging agent in real-time applications.
> 
> So nothing mentioned here about in-process or not.  This applies all the
> same to the agent expression mechinary in GDBserver (tracepoints, etc.).
> That's an agent as well.  "agent" is a very loose term for roughly something
> that runs on the remote target on GDB's behalf.  Can we just drop that
> explanation?  If we name things clearly then that's unnecessary.
> 

I am inclined to leave this explanation there, as it is still useful to
generic term "agent".

> So I'd suggest also:
> 
> On 02/20/2012 02:40 AM, Yao Qi wrote:
>> +reduce the number of operations performed by debugger.  @dfn{Agent},
> 
> the in-process agent
> 

s/agent/in-process agent/ in my patch.

-- 
Yao (齐尧)