Re: RFC: Available registers as a target property

Paul Schlie
2005-05-10T00:03:15Z

> 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.