From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (qmail 16038 invoked by alias); 10 May 2005 00:03:15 -0000 Mailing-List: contact gdb-help@sources.redhat.com; run by ezmlm Precedence: bulk List-Subscribe: List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: , Sender: gdb-owner@sources.redhat.com Received: (qmail 16004 invoked from network); 10 May 2005 00:03:07 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO rwcrmhc11.comcast.net) (204.127.198.35) by sourceware.org with SMTP; 10 May 2005 00:03:07 -0000 Received: from [10.0.1.2] (c-24-61-199-96.hsd1.nh.comcast.net[24.61.199.96]) by comcast.net (rwcrmhc11) with SMTP id <2005051000030601300illmte>; Tue, 10 May 2005 00:03:06 +0000 User-Agent: Microsoft-Entourage/11.1.0.040913 Date: Tue, 10 May 2005 00:03:00 -0000 Subject: Re: RFC: Available registers as a target property From: Paul Schlie To: Daniel Jacobowitz , Chris Zankel , Message-ID: Mime-version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-transfer-encoding: 7bit X-SW-Source: 2005-05/txt/msg00128.txt.bz2 > The daemon would already have to be updated to understand any new > protocol extensions, so we're talking about modifying that agent in > any case. Given that, can you explain what advantage we would gain > by having GDB pass configuration information to the daemon, instead of > having the daemon parse some text file at startup and then communicate > the configuration information to GDB? Possibly because it's GDB which needs to know about both the symbolic and semantics associated with registers and their interpretation, a target interface only needs to know which and in what order GDB expects to have their values communicated in, not what they mean, or how logically relate to the program being debugged. I.e. a target interface only needs to know how to retrieve/update register values for a particular physical or simulated target, usually established by convention, and possibly optionally identify a target more specifically to GDB by returning a configuration status word typically defined by configurable processors, or by simply literally specifying to GDB which configuration to presume when invoked, just as is essentially done today, as one can't expect to debug a PPC if GDB is configured to presume an x86 target for example.