mapping addresses

["John S. Yates, Jr." <jyates@netezza.com>]

Looking for advice / guidance:

We are doing a home-grown embedded kernel which
runs with the MMU turned-on.  The twist in this
design is that address maps are true first class
objects that have an existence independent of
any tasks.  A task may have no current map (only
shared regions guaranteed accessible) or it may
explicitly attach to a map.  And of course it is
fully meaningful for a map to exist even though
no tasks are currently attached to it.

For debugging I would like the following:

(1) an address expression syntax that denotes
    dereferencing relative to given map tag

(2) a means of establishing a default map tag
    for those cases where no map tag is given

Is there enough support in GDB for x86 segment
addressing to provide a starting point for (1)?
How generalizable is it?  [Currently using the
PowerPC though in future anything is possible.]

Is current support for switching amount thread
a reasonable starting point for (2)?

tia,

/john


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John S. Yates, Jr.   508 665-6897 (voice)
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