Re: RFC: MI output during program execution

[Jim Ingham <jingham@apple.com>]

This isn't just Mac OS X.  Any ptrace based system that wants to  
write a real async target is going to have to spawn a thread  
somewhere to do it, since ptrace is a blocking call.

This isn't so bad, though.  If the platform doesn't have a reliable  
pthreads implementation, it won't get a flakey gdb, rather, it just  
won't get an async native target.

Jim



On Oct 3, 2005, at 2:37 PM, Stan Shebs wrote:

> Daniel Jacobowitz wrote:
>
>
>> On Tue, Oct 04, 2005 at 08:29:32AM +1300, Nick Roberts wrote:
>>
>>
>>> Daniel Jacobowitz writes:
>>> > Sorry, miscommunication.  You don't need approval to create a  
>>> branch;
>>> > go right ahead.
>>>
>>> OK. Thanks.
>>>
>>> > I violently dislike the idea of linking gdb with pthreads.  I'm
>>> > confident that we can get the benefits without that, however.   
>>> I've got
>>> > this patch sitting in my queue of things to play with.
>>>
>>> I know this will sound stupid but what is the alternative? Using  
>>> fork?
>>>
>>>
>>
>> Doing it "asynchronously" through the GDB event loop, which is I
>> believe the same way we handle remote async targets.  All in one
>> process.
>>
>>
> Remote async can do it (more-or-less) portably because both the user
> and target interaction happen through file descriptors, and the usual
> API supports multiplexing. Darwin is problematic because you have
> to get some data from events and the like that only have blocking
> calls to monitor, so you need a thread per blocking syscall.
>
>
>>
>> This is a little more complicated to design, however, it's got less
>> complexity at runtime.  I've spent enough of my life using GDB on
>> systems where pthreads didn't work that I don't want to make GDB
>> dependent on them.
>>
>>
> Ideally you'd push the thread/multiplex decision down into target  
> code,
> but this would be a semi-ambitious rework to event-loop.c. It might
> not matter though, if Darwin (and other configs maybe) can keep using
> their own thread-hell code, while something like Linux can assume file
> descriptors for inferior monitoring and thus use the general  
> mechanism.
>
> Stan
>
>