Re: support for multiple ARM register banks in GDB

Daniel Jacobowitz
2006-05-11T14:53:56Z

On Thu, May 11, 2006 at 03:50:37PM +0100, Brendan Kehoe wrote:
> Hi folks,
>
> Is anyone already looking at GDB's port to the ARM, and in particular
> what it believes is the single register bank on the chip? For
> processors like the ARM7TDMI, there are a few register banks depending
> on the current mode of the ARM. In order to debug (not C++) exceptions
> on an ARM embedded target, it's necessary to be able to look at a
> specific bank's register like r13_irq. This sort of stuff appears to be
> in place in the simulator, but not in GDB itself.

I've implemented banked register support, as a sample application of
the XML-based register description work I've posted about several
times. The GDB client and the RDI-based GDB stub we ship in
the 2006-Q1 CodeSourcery release includes support for banked registers.
Of course, if your target isn't RDI-based, that doesn't directly help
you. But it shouldn't be hard to do for a custom debug stub either.

(It took all of an hour or two once the XML bits were in place, so I'd
say it was a successful test run).

--
Daniel Jacobowitz
CodeSourcery