From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (qmail 17874 invoked by alias); 3 Nov 2008 19:11:52 -0000 Received: (qmail 17804 invoked by uid 22791); 3 Nov 2008 19:11:51 -0000 X-Spam-Check-By: sourceware.org Received: from mx1a.swcp.com (HELO mx1a.swcp.com) (216.184.2.64) by sourceware.org (qpsmtpd/0.31) with ESMTP; Mon, 03 Nov 2008 19:10:56 +0000 Received: from ame7.swcp.com (ame7.swcp.com [216.184.2.70]) by mx1a.swcp.com (8.13.4/8.13.4/Debian-3sarge3) with ESMTP id mA3JAsfA020367 for ; Mon, 3 Nov 2008 12:10:54 -0700 Received: from swcp.com (nousagi.swcp.com [216.184.2.107] (may be forged)) by ame7.swcp.com (8.14.2/8.13.6) with SMTP id mA3JAprk009245; Mon, 3 Nov 2008 12:10:52 -0700 (MST) (envelope-from ebo@sandien.com) Date: Mon, 03 Nov 2008 19:11:00 -0000 To: Subject: using gdb to do embedded unit/regression testing From: "EBo" X-Mailer: TWIG 2.7.7 Message-ID: X-Client-IP: 216.184.15.167 Cc: "John David" Reply-To: ebo@sandien.com X-Greylist: Message whitelisted by DRAC access database, not delayed by milter-greylist-3.0 (ame7.swcp.com [216.184.2.128]); Mon, 03 Nov 2008 12:10:52 -0700 (MST) X-Virus-Status: Clean Mailing-List: contact gdb-help@sourceware.org; run by ezmlm Precedence: bulk List-Id: List-Subscribe: List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: , Sender: gdb-owner@sourceware.org X-SW-Source: 2008-11/txt/msg00013.txt.bz2 Hello, I have a simple proof of concept which does simple live inplace unit/regression testing on embedded hardware via a JTAG interface. To really make gdb work for this context I will either have to use "More complex GDB scripting" and/or modify gdb's command line interface and print command. The current issue at hand is that `print "STRING"` only works if the program is running AND gdb can interface with malloc. On the embedded project which I am currently testing this idea out, malloc is not available and the print command returns an error. What I was trying to do is simply write some diagnostic comments to help orient myself when reading the output from gdb which was piped to a file. If there is some other way to write diagnostic strings to stdout other than `print "STRING"` which does not require some call to malloc? If so please let me know. I have not seen anything like this in the documentation yet. The second issue will be cleaning up and formatting the output from the automated unit/regression test suites. For this I will want/need to suppress almost all output from gdb, and use the print command above to deal with the formatting. If I end up using gdb to help do this type of eXtreme/Agile program testing I would like to work with the gdb maintainers to have it integrated upstream... Is this the best venue to open discussion for such modifications? Best regards, EBo --