Re: [RFC] canonical linespec and multiple breakpoints ...

Avi Gozlan
2011-09-18T10:22:45Z

Hello,

On the basis of your proposal dealing with supporting multiple breakpoints and the discussion that followed it, I would like to raise some questions. These issues are highly relevant for our needs (the need was first described in bug 12313 in the GDB bug database).

Among varying GDB uses, we use GDB to debug a process which loads (using dlopen) the same exact library multiple times (in fact there are copies of the library otherwise dlopen returns the same handle for each load). We find your proposal very useful for us to be able to attach to the process and debug a specific library. Though, we do have some questions and suggestions. Pardon technical inaccuracies in GDB terminology.

1) The proposal discusses function breakpoints. Will it also enable inspecting global and static variables from a specific library?

2) Just to make sure we understand the interaction of the user interface with "set multiple-symbols": it will be possible to request GDB for a specific variable/function by a library name without getting it from all libraries or get a question (ask) each time, right? Otherwise it will be very inconvenient to inspect multiple variables within a given library.

3) Will the library specific interface know how to handle non-stripped libraries that are compiled without debug information (no "-g")?

4) We suggest adding an option to enable the GDB backtrace command to show the library name for each function. In our usage case we have scenarios in which the libraries interact with each other and a backtrace showing the library name for each function can enable us understand the interaction perfectly.

5) Perhaps a little pedantic but what about handling symbols with different names in libraries with identical name which lie in different paths?

Thanks,

Avi