Re: [RFA] Displaced stepping just enable in non-stop mode

Daniel Jacobowitz
2008-10-16T18:33:03Z

On Thu, Oct 16, 2008 at 08:25:13PM +0200, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> Can we reliably use displaced stepping, or can't we? If we can do
> that reliably in vast majority of use-cases, we should do that even
> without non-stop. If we cannot do that reliably enough, we shouldn't
> turn it on even with non-stop mode, or maybe refuse to turn on
> non-stop, rather than risk screwing the users.

We do not know whether it's reliable or not. It depends on properties
of the target system that GDB has no knowledge of. But there's no way
to use non-stop without displaced stepping; so we require it to work
on any target that supports non-stop debugging.

> We could also try to detect if it works, and display a warning if we
> think it won't (RE the cases you described above).

Hmm, that's an interesting idea. Pedro, what do you think - would
autodetection work for the cases we've seen trouble? Something as
simple as "can we write to _start" is probably enough, but I don't
remember what the failure looked like with the record target; and in
that case it may be complicated by the fact that we're initially going
forwards and could write.

> > I'm not sure what else to call displaced stepping. "Step around
> > breakpoints"?
>
> The text mentions "out-of-line stepping", which sounds better to me.

I like "set step out-of-line"...

--
Daniel Jacobowitz
CodeSourcery