Re: patching gdb, adding files for certain combinations of host/target

[Torsten Mohr <tmohr@s.netic.de>]

Hi,

> Right now there's no obvious way, but I'm sure it could be managed if
> it was needed.  Let me ask a different question: why do you want to do
> this?  A design goal for GDB is that it shouldn't matter what your host
> is.

I wrote a library available at:

http://www.s.netic.de/tmohr/pppcb-0.2.0.tar.gz
(There's a newer, better version available, but not yet on
that web page).

It does several things with the parallel port, for example
debugging an ARM via a software JTAG over the parallel port.

This only makes sense for the target ARM.

The library also has some abstraction for accessing the
parallel port, but i'd like to only compile everything
at the moment for host linux and target ARM.
Only for Linux i know how to access the parallel port in
user space.

Also, i took a look at a patch mpcbdm-1.2.3.tar.gz available
at SourceForge (a patch to debug a PowerPC via the parallel port).

This patch wasn't compiled because (i think so) i chose target
"powerpc-unknown-elf" and the author seems to use the target
"powerpc-linux".  So he has put the target object file dependencies
in a file gdb/config/powerpc/linux.mt.

I tried to change that patch in a way that makes it compile for
target powerpc but failed.  I'm far from being an experienced
gdb programmer, though i read this list for quite a while now.


As several micros have debug interfaces like BDM or JTAG,
i think it would be useful to add an abstraction for the
parallel port (host dependent) and based on that some more
debug interfaces.  This could increase the usage of gdb
for cross development a lot.


I'm glad for any hints you could give.


Best regards,
Torsten.