suggestion: release GDB 6.8.1

Thiago Jung Bauermann
2008-07-29T02:29:35Z

Hi everybody,

Since the next big GDB release will take a while yet in order to wait
for the current developments to settle down, I'd like to suggest making
a point release to get some patches out there earlier.

In particular, Ulrich Weigand fixed issues with versioned symbols and
plt entries in ppc64-linux which fix a number of failures in the GDB
testsuite and are also easy enough to stumble upon in practice.

Up until now I have the following list of patches which I'd like to
include:

- Re: [RFA] Fix GDB's handling of the inferior controlling terminal.
http://sourceware.org/ml/gdb-patches/2008-03/msg00126.html

- Fix several PowerPC64 ABI issues
http://sourceware.org/ml/gdb-patches/2008-05/msg00118.html

- Handle minimal symbols pointing to function descriptors:
http://sourceware.org/ml/gdb-patches/2008-05/msg00120.html

This one actually depends on a patch which introduces
get_objfile_arch, which in turn depends on a patch reworking DWARF-2
address size handling. Instead of pulling all that, it's easier to
just replace all calls to get_objfile_arch by current_gdbarch.

- Fix stepping into solib function on powerpc64-linux
http://sourceware.org/ml/gdb-patches/2008-05/msg00451.html

SÃ©rgio already backported the patches above to GDB 6.8 and ran the
testsuite on ppc-linux and ppc64-linux, finding no regressions.

For ppc64, the following improvement is seen:

=== gdb Summary ===

-# of expected passes 12042
-# of unexpected failures 150
+# of expected passes 12080
+# of unexpected failures 112
# of unexpected successes 2
# of expected failures 44
# of known failures 39
# of untested testcases 10
# of unsupported tests 41

Which is nothing to sneeze at. However, current CVS HEAD on the same
machine gives:

=== gdb Summary ===

# of expected passes 12641
# of unexpected failures 73
# of expected failures 41
# of known failures 61
# of unresolved testcases 2
# of untested testcases 10
# of unsupported tests 43

So I guess there are a few other patches worth including in the branch.
I'll see if I can spot them.
--
[]'s
Thiago Jung Bauermann
Software Engineer
IBM Linux Technology Center