RE: Our next GDB release (GDB version 6.8)

Pierre Muller
2008-01-28T10:56:10Z

I would really like to have the
call to __main fixed !
This would allow to get consistent behavior
between linux and cygwin/mingw32 for the
'start' command as skip_prologue would
really go up to the first real instruction.

Pedro proposed a patch for this,
http://sourceware.org/ml/gdb-patches/2007-10/msg00361.html
which is not perfect in the sense that it is
i386 specific, while this should be
processor independent.
But supporting this for all compilers
might require much bigger changes,
like adding a processor independent layer to
skip_prologue, that would be able to
just call process_is_call (CORE_ADDR pc, char *func_name)
that would return pc if it is not a call instruction
or the CORE_ADDR after the call instruction if pc points to a call
instruction,
and func_name would return the function name if the call
points to a existing function (the second argument type
might also be a psymbol struct, or something similar...)
This could be used for __main _alloca, but probably also
for _mcount for executables containing profiling information.

The reason this change is probably much bigger is
that it would require to add a new processor_is_call function
to the tdep struct, and restructure the skip_prologue.

Is it reasonable to hope for inclusion of this
patch before the branch?

Pierre Muller

PS: I would also like my small second patch about BINOP_INTDIV