From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (qmail 21582 invoked by alias); 16 May 2005 18:04:03 -0000 Mailing-List: contact gdb-help@sources.redhat.com; run by ezmlm Precedence: bulk List-Subscribe: List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: , Sender: gdb-owner@sources.redhat.com Received: (qmail 20939 invoked from network); 16 May 2005 18:03:54 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO shearer.org) (210.10.97.33) by sourceware.org with SMTP; 16 May 2005 18:03:54 -0000 Received: from localhost ([127.0.0.1]:53343 helo=shearer.org) by shearer.org with esmtp (Dan's MTA 1.0) id 1DXjwX-0002U0-Gu for gdb@sources.redhat.com; Tue, 17 May 2005 03:33:53 +0930 Received: from dan by erizo.shearer.org with local (Spammer Slammer 3.141) id 1DXjwW-0002Tx-Sg for gdb@sources.redhat.com; Tue, 17 May 2005 03:33:52 +0930 Date: Mon, 16 May 2005 18:04:00 -0000 From: Dan Shearer To: gdb@sources.redhat.com Subject: Re: [discuss] Support for reverse-execution Message-ID: <20050516180352.GN19642@erizo.shearer.org> References: <20050516174649.GM19642@erizo.shearer.org> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-15 Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <20050516174649.GM19642@erizo.shearer.org> Organisation: shearer.org User-Agent: Mutt X-SW-Source: 2005-05/txt/msg00163.txt.bz2 On Tue, May 17, 2005 at 03:16:49AM +0930, Dan Shearer wrote: > Personally I think reversibility is the biggest advance in debugging > since source code debugging. We've got massive and complicated codebases > we're working with today and we need better productivity. Projects like > KDE, Samba and OpenOffice use valgrind+gdb. With reversibility > productivity will improve even more, I can't make valgrind reversible > but I can help with gdb. That's why I'm here in a personal capacity. > > When Reversibility Becomes Useful > --------------------------------- > > From what I've learned with Simics, reversibility becomes a generally > useful technique when both the simulator and the problem have certain > characteristics. ... going on to describe something that valgrind is unlikely ever to become :-) What I am trying to say, I suppose, is that I have learned from a very general solution how debugging is helped by reversibility. I'm sure some of this knowledge scales down to the vertical solutions, however as per the example of Cygnus' SID simulator if you start looking at a micro-level view it is possible to come to the conclusion "so why bother?" -- Dan Shearer dan@shearer.org