Fwd: Can GDB interact with serial ports on remote targets?

Brendan J
2015-02-20T14:27:29Z

I am using GDB to debug a remote target: I start GDB then type `target
remote foo:1234`. I do I/O with the target via a serial port. So I
have to have two terminals open: one with picocom (connected to
something like /dev/ttyUSB0) and one with GDB (connected to OpenOCD
via a socket). To be clear: the debug connection is *not over the
serial port*, it's over a totally separate JTAG interface.

As you know, when you debug a "normal" (i.e. not "remote") inferior in
GDB, its stdin and stdout are multiplexed into GDB's TTY so that you
can interact with it while it's running [1].

Is it possible to achieve that for a remote target - that is: can GDB
connect to the serial port itself so I can do I/O with the target from
within the GDB session?

If not, is this something that might be feasible? Maybe GDB could
multiplex its I/O so that while the inferior is running it passes
characters to/from an external tool like picocom? (As you can see I'm
fairly ignorant about this whole issue at the moment).

Thanks,
Brendan

PS: I'm using arm-none-eabi-gdb, in case that happens to be relevant.

[1] https://sourceware.org/gdb/onlinedocs/gdb/Input_002fOutput.html