Re: [RFC PATCH 0/4] GDB Linux Kernel Thread Awareness

[Jeff Mahoney <jeffm@suse.com>]

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On 2/25/16 2:15 PM, Kieran Bingham wrote:
> I've wanted to get some actual code out for a while and as such I have
> tried to strip down the implementation of LKD to the bare essentials for
> implementing thread awareness. I hope to get some feedback on the best ways of
> upstreaming this functionality.
> 
> This functionality implements the 'possible improvements' Related to Execution
> Contexts as mentioned in Andreas' slides on slide 18 [1] and allows a user
> to perform 'info threads' and see the currently running and sleeping tasks.
> Switching to a specific task, then functions as expected with 'thread NN', and
> 'bt' to produce a back trace of that thread.
> 
> Indeed this patch set hopes to satisfy Andreas' request in [2] to submit a
> small patchset of the initial features. In this case, the thread awareness.
> 
> Now that I have separated out the LKD code from the ST's internal STMC code,
> it could also be possible to publish the larger project if it is of relevance,
> though that will be heavier reading than this reduced patch.
> 
> This implementation is in C and heavily derived from the implementation
> created by ST, as the aim of the upstreaming project is to reuse as much
> of the ST implementation as is reasonable.
> 
> The python-ic version of this that I've been working on (gdb.Target) hits a
> few problems, in guarding against infinite recursion as many of the python
> API's end up calling back into the target layer, and exceptions in that layer
> tend to make GDB crash in very un-user-friendly ways.

FWIW, I've continued to use your Python implementation and have extended
it to meet our needs.  I haven't encountered the recursion you describe,
but it may be that I haven't pushed it hard enough yet.  I think you're
probably more focused on active targets while we're mostly working on dumps.

-Jeff

-- 
Jeff Mahoney
SUSE Labs


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