Re: GDB paper accepted for GCC summit

[PAUL GILLIAM <pgilliam@us.ibm.com>]

Here is stuff about new or improved "user-level" features I gleaned from
NEWS.  I would welcome any comments.

--------  >6.4  --------

New Features:

    Checkpoints
This facility allows the user to create a checkpoint, continue
        debugging, and then 'backup' to the point where the checkpoint
        was taken.  More that one checkpoint can be made and commands
        have been added to manage them.

Improved Features:

    fork
Previously, the user had to decide which process should continue
        to be debugged after a fork: the parent or the child.  The one
        not debugged would run unhindered to completion.  Now it is 
        possible to debug both processes without the kludge of starting
        a second GDB.

    Convenience Variables
A number of improvements where made for convenience variables:
        *  A new command was added: "init-if-undefined": this is useful
           for user defined functions that need to save state.
        *  In general, convenience variables are no longer reset by a
           symbol-file command.

    Windows Host Support
GDB now builds as a cross debugger hosted on i686-mingw32,
        including native console support, and remote communications
        using either network sockets or serial ports.

Removed Features:

    ARM rdi-share module

    Netware NLM Debug Server


--------  6.4  --------

New Features:

    BSD user-level threads support
User level thread libraries are now supported for freeBSD and
        openBSD.  Kernel thread libraries are not yet supported.

    VAX floating point support
Support was added for the not-quite-IEEE VAX F and D floating
        point formats.

Improved Features:

    User-defined command support   
        A new convenience variable, $argc, has been added so that a user
        defined function can know how man arguments were given when it
        is invoked.

    Displaying Arrays
When an array is displayed, its values are displayed without
        reference to their index in the array.  The new 'set  print 
        array-indexes" command my be used so that index values are
        included.

Removed Features:



--------  6.3  --------

New Features:

    "-l" command line option 
        GDB now accepts -l followed by a number to set the timeout for
        remote debugging.

    Support for GCC -feliminate-dwarf2-dups
        GDB now supports a more compact representation of DWARF-2 debug
        information using DW_FORM_ref_addr references.  These are
        produced by GCC with the option -feliminate-dwarf2-dups and also
        by some proprietary compilers.  With GCC, you must use GCC 3.3.4
        or later to use -feliminate-dwarf2-dups.

    Internationalization
        When supported by the host system, GDB will be built with
        internationalization (libintl).  The task of marking up the
        sources is continued, we're looking forward to our first
        translation.

    Ada
        Initial support for debugging programs compiled with the GNAT
        implementation of the Ada programming language has been
        integrated into GDB.  In this release, support is limited to
        expression evaluation.

Improved Features:

    Remote Protocol
        GDB's remote protocol now includes support for the 'p' packet.
        This packet is used to fetch individual registers from a remote
        inferior.

Removed Features:



--------  6.2.1  --------

This release fixed a couple of near 'show stoppers' on the MIPS and VAX
architectures.


--------  6.2 --------

New Features:

    Support for the BSD Kernel Data Access Library (libkvm) interface.
        Using 'target kvm', it is now possible to debug kernel core
        dumps and live kernel memory images on various BSD flavored 
        platforms.  Currently, the following native-only configurations
        are supported:  FreeBSD/amd64, FreeBSD/i386, NetBSD/i386,
        NetBSD/m68k, NetBSD/sparc, OpenBSD/amd64, OpenBSD/i386,
        OpenBSD/m68k, and OpenBSD/sparc.

    Cygwin support for DWARF 2.

Improved Features:

    Threads
        Support for NPTL threads was enhanced to work better with target
        programs that rapidly create and delete threads.

Removed Features:

    Command line options "-async" and "-noasync", which supported the
    broken "no acync" feature, where removed, effectively removing the
    feature.



--------  6.1.1  --------

This was primarily a maintenance release to fix several built problems.

New Features:

Improved Features:

    Text-mode User Interface
        The TUI (text-mode user interface) is now build by default.
        This is a curses based interface that provides a kind of
        primitive 'GUI' and can be activated by using the -i=tui command
        line option to GDB or by running the separate "gdbtui" program.
        See the manual for more info.

Removed Features:



--------  6.1  --------

New Features:

    Pending Breakpoints
        Support was added to allow setting breakpoints in shared
        libraries that have not yet been loaded.  If the 'breakpoint
        pending' option is set to auto, the user is asked if a the
        breakpoint should be made pending on a future shared-library
        load.  When the breakpoint symbol is resolved, the pending
        breakpoint is removed and one or more regular breakpoints are
        created.  Pending breakpoints are very useful for GCJ Java
        debugging.

Improved Features:

    New C++ Demangler
        A new demangler was added that does a better job on mangled
        names generated by G++.  The new demangler also runs faster,
        helping GDB to start up faster on large C++ programs.

    DWARF 2 Location Expressions
        Support was extended to support function arguments and frame
        bases.  Formally, these would cause GDB to crash.

    C++ nested types and namespaces
        Support for these was improved, especially for users of DWARF 2.

Removed Features:



--------  6.0  --------

New Features:

    Objective-C
        Support for debugging programs written in the Objective-C
        language has been integrated into GDB.

    Thread local storage (TLS)
Now supports the GNU/Linux implementation of per-thread
        variables.

    Dwarf 2 location expressions
These allow a compiler to more completely describe where
        variables are located, in memory and/or registers, even when
        optimization is used.  Preliminary support was a added


Improved Features:

    Remote Protocol
Extended to support hosted file I/O.  This is  where the remote
        target can make use of the file system that GDB can access.

    Threads
GDB now supports the new NPTL threads as well as the older
        LinuxThreads library.

Removed Features: