Re: Wondering if record save should be deprecated

[Guinevere Larsen via Gdb <gdb@sourceware.org>]

On 7/16/24 9:24 AM, Luis Machado wrote:
> On 7/10/24 20:58, Guinevere Larsen via Gdb wrote:
>> Hi everyone!
>>
>> I decided to try a bit of a different workflow for reverse debugging and noticed that using "record save", then loading that file in a new gdb session, and I noticed this generated an assert. The assert itself is not too hard to solve (Hannes had a patch ready when I mentioned it in IRC), but it had me wondering: this bug is present since GDB 10, and there are no bugs in bugzilla about it.
>>
>> In fact, searching for "record save" only has a stack overflow question from 2.5 years ago that uses precsave, but is about a separate topic. Everything else, including the few reverse debugging tutorials I've seen, never mention this option.
>>
>> Does it make sense for us to continue supporting this feature that was nigh unusable for 5 releases without anyone noticing? Does anyone reading this makes use of this feature and managed to somehow avoid that crash?
>>
> If it is easy enough to fix, sounds like that is the way then. As for whether people are using this,
> it is hard to tell. I've been hearing more and more about people using RR for their
> reverse debugging needs. Does it also save state?
>
Yes. RR has 2 completely separate phases, one recording the execution of 
the inferior, and another opening a gdbserver that uses that recording 
for execution. So it's not like GDB is the only way to get a recording 
of a broken execution to be debugged later. The difference is that with 
RR you decide at the start that you want to record things, and with GDB 
you can decide mid-debugging session. And that RR only works for a few 
x86_64 CPUs, while GDB supports many more.

I've been convinced, let's keep it :)

-- 
Cheers,
Guinevere Larsen
She/Her/Hers