From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Stephane Carrez To: nsd@redhat.com Cc: gdb@sources.redhat.com, fnasser@redhat.com, insight@sources.redhat.com Subject: Re: Register group proposal Date: Wed, 21 Feb 2001 03:00:00 -0000 Message-id: <200102211100.MAA29081@sunchorus.France.Sun.COM> X-SW-Source: 2001-02/msg00269.html Hi! > >On an architecture with a large register set, GDBtk's register window can >be difficult to read and slow to update. Users can customize the window >to hide individual registers, but that's a tedious procedure. > Yes. It really makes sense. For ChorusOS, we have this notion of 'grouping'. The DebugAPI allows to retrieve all registers of a given group. Until now, we have defined three groups (could define more): - general registers (ie, r0..r31, eax, ...) - floating point registers (ie, f0,...) - specific registers (ie, sprg0, dbat, cr0, ...) In most cases, you are interested to look at general registers or floating point regs. Less often, you will need to display the specific registers. It would be interesting then to take the 'grouping' into account by the new/next register API. The current semantics of `to_fetch_registers()' when a -1 is passed is to fetch all registers. You can see that as a group of all registers. I think it's then necessary to clarify or extend this semantics. The goal is that if someone asks for the general registers, we don't have to fetch the specific/floating point registers. Well, this is very close to a previous discussion about optimizing the fetch of registers within all GDB sources (frame, backtrace, locals, ...) > >The CLI "info registers" command already accepts a register name as an >optional paramter. It could be extended to try that parameter as a group >name first and a register name second, so e.g. "info registers float" >would display all floating-point registers. > >What do you think? > >Nick It's great if a given platform could define its own groups of registers and that they are recognized by Insight after that. What about plugging the grouping in your regs_init_*() functions? Stephane - - - - - - - - - - Stephane |Sun Microsystems | Carrez |Network Service Provider Division | http://www.sun.com |6 avenue Gustave Eiffel | |F-78182, St-Quentin-en-Yvelines-Cedex | email: Stephane.Carrez@France.Sun.COM