Re: [Patch] More responsive QUITs

Tom Tromey
2011-07-15T20:47:00Z

Sterling> Enclosed is a patch that adds calls to QUIT in various places which
Sterling> makes GDB more responsive to CTRL-C. In particular, reading a symbol
Sterling> file at start up can now be interrupted (although perhaps still not as
Sterling> responsive as one might like), as well as various other long running
Sterling> operations. I know at least two GDB developers have one or another of
Sterling> these on their TODO lists.

Yeah, I'm one of those.

Sterling> All three of these calls to QUIT have relatively close cleanup
Sterling> handlers:
[...]

I agree these are safe as to their immediate surrounds; but the problem
is what happens later on. That is, I think a quit when building
psymtabs will just leave the remaining psymtabs unread. This will
greatly interfere with debugging.

We have lazy psymtab reading now. So, it is tempting to try to record
where the processing was stopped and then restart it there. However,
this may be difficult to do without leaking memory, due to the use of
obstacks. Perhaps some leakage would be ok, though; or maybe by making
the granularity a single psymtab it would be possible not to leak at all
(not sure).

Tom