Re: GDB for multiple targets

[Daniel Jacobowitz <drow@false.org>]

On Mon, Nov 24, 2008 at 07:03:37PM -0500, Duane Ellis wrote:
> (1) In the case of OpenOCD - nothing ensures the *openocd.cfg* file  
> matches what the *EXE*FILE* says and/or the actual hardware target found  
> via jtag. My goal wold be reporting up information so at a minimum some  
> warning message could be printed.

Yes, we already do generate such warnings.  You have to generate an
architecture element in the description to get that behavior though.

> (2)  In the arm micro controller "bare-metal-world" - the OSABI is often  
> not used or is generic, example: arm-elf - is a generic widely used  
> configuration that does not report the actual OS being used.

arm-elf is not an OSABI, it's a target triplet.  The usual OSABI for
it is "none".  GDB doesn't support dynamic registration of new OSABIs,
but it could probably be implemented.

> Many embedded debuggers have the ability to display on-chip registers,  
> ie: The MicroChip IDE for PIC32 (a mips m4K cpu, via GCC) has displays  
> for UART, TIMERS, GPIO.
>
> GDB Front Ends (ie: Eclipse, insight) could also display this type of  
> information - if - it had details about the chip.

The way to do this is not by chip name but by the rest of the target
description language.  We're already doing that at CodeSourcery.

> (5)  One other road block today - is while GDB can fetch this  
> information. I know of no command in GDB to pass the "target.xml" up the  
> food chain to the front end (ie: eclipse, insight)
>
> Maybe a command like: "targetxmlfetch 'target.xml'" is needed?
>
> (6) Same could be said about the "memorymap.xml"

Right.  Patches welcome.

> None of us are *today* in the position to make all of these things  
> happen.

I beg to differ.  There's no chicken and egg problem.  I and others
have spent the past several years adding this sort of feature to GDB
for the same reasons you describe and we're already doing things with
GDB that the GDB of several years ago couldn't come close to.

When you need things that we haven't added already, you're more than
welcome to contribute :-) But please see about an FSF copyright
assignment if you plan to do that; I can help you with that if you
don't have one yet.

-- 
Daniel Jacobowitz
CodeSourcery