Re: Why aren't inferiors deleted on exit or detach

[Yao Qi <yao@codesourcery.com>]

On 05/07/2014 04:16 AM, Breazeal, Don wrote:
> I've been struggling with the issue of when to delete inferiors, as I'm 
> working on remote follow-fork.  It looks like inferiors are kept around 
> after a process exits or is detached or killed so that the user can 
> switch to the inferior and run it again.  The argument vector for the 
> inferior is kept intact on exit/detach/etc.
> 
> Is my understanding here correct?

Yes, I think so.
https://sourceware.org/gdb/onlinedocs/gdb/Inferiors-and-Programs.html
mentions that "Inferiors may be created before a process runs, and may
be retained after a process exits." and "After the successful completion
of a command such as detach, detach inferiors, kill or kill inferiors,
or after a normal process exit, the inferior is still valid and listed
with info inferiors, ready to be restarted."

> 
> With "follow-fork parent" and "detach-on-fork on", GDB does *not* keep 
> an inferior around for the detached child.  My guess is that this is 
> because the child inferior would just be a duplicate of the parent inferior.
> 
> Correct?

I am not the people write this part of code, but afaik, GDB doesn't add
inferior into its table in this case, because these two options setting
mean after a fork, the original process is debugged and child process
will be detached, so GDB doesn't have to save child process in its
inferior table.

-- 
Yao (齐尧)