Re: [PATCH v3 5/8] gdbserver: Transmit target description ID in thread list and stop reply

Simon Marchi via Gdb-patches
2023-02-01T17:03:26Z

> Having read some of the later patches, I have some additional thoughts
> here:
>
> I think we should make it explicit here that IDs are connection wide,
> not per-process. We should also make it clear that GDB might[1] cache
> target descriptions per remote connection, and so a remote target should
> not reuse a target description ID except where the target description is
> identical.
>
> [1] I say "GDB might" here because if we say "GDB will" then this would
> imply each target description will only be asked for once. And I
> figure, why be overly restrictive.

Thanks for pointing this out, I had the same thought while reading the
patch.

In my original idea, I imagined that target description IDs could be
some hashes computed from the XML content (a bit like git hashes or ELF
build IDs), such that a given target description would always have the
same ID. This would give clients the possibility to cache target
descriptions locally, a bit like the index cache. It did sound nice,
but perhaps it's not really important.

Simon