Re: [PATCH RFA] procfs.c related changes for AIX 5

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@is.elta.co.il>]

On Mon, 5 Mar 2001, Kevin Buettner wrote:

>  2) AIX5 does not have a static set of syscalls.  Consequently, there
>     is no sys/syscall.h file which provides a nice mapping of
>     symbolic names to syscall numbers.  Instead, AIX5 provides
>     /proc/PID/sysent which contains the information necessary to map
>     strings to syscall numbers.
>     
>     These syscall numbers are guaranteed (at least according to the
>     developer that I spoke with) to be fixed for the lifetime of a
>     process, but they can certainly vary between processes.

Won't this cause problems with debugging syscall-related code, since
the values for GDB and the debuggee may be different?

>     The changes needed to the code due to this change were fairly
>     significant:
> 
>     a) sysset_t data structures (or data structures which contain
>        sysset_t) must be dynamically allocated.  They must be
>        copied with memcpy() and explicitly freed when no longer
>        needed.
> 
>     b) Comparisons against SYS_* constants no longer work.  I've
>        introduced a number of predicate functions (such as
>        syscall_is_exit()) which will indicate whether a
>        given system call number is a particular system call.  All code
>        which formerly relied on comparisons against a system call
>        number was rewritten to call one of these new predicate
>        functions instead.

Shouldn't these be documented somehow in gdbint.texinfo?