Re: Tracepoint support in Cygnus GDB ?

["Eli Zaretskii" <eliz@elta.co.il>]

> Date: Thu, 25 Sep 2003 10:45:32 -0400
> From: Andrew Cagney <ac131313@redhat.com>
> 
> > "Eli Zaretskii" <eliz@elta.co.il> writes:
> > 
> >> > Date: Wed, 24 Sep 2003 16:09:49 +0530
> >> > From: Saravanan <pes@india.hp.com>
> >> >   
> >> >   1. Why does GDB not provide this support for local
> >> >   host ?
> > 
> >> 
> >> Simple: because no one wrote tracepoints support for native
> >> debugging.
> > 
> > 
> > Right -- please contribute support for native tracepoints!
> 
> Just don't take Jim's request at face value :-)

On the contrary: please do ;-)

Seriously: as someone who earns his paycheck by writing and debugging
real-time software and teaching others to do so efficiently, a
debugger that can be used to run a real-time program without
completely disrupting it is something to kill for.  (Currently, use of
a debugger is limited to coredumps.)  If GDB were to support such a
feature, it would be a debugger of choice for many of my co-workers.

If done well, native tracepoints might make this possible.

> The thing to keep in mind is that GDB's development model is one of 
> constant incremental change - fix a structure here, move a method there, 
> oops just accidently fixed a 15 year old bug of not being able to return 
> small structs, ...

If this is supposed to be a gripe on the fact that no significant
user-level changes were added to GDB (except, perhaps, on GNU/Linux
systems), then I, too, am worried by that.