Re: RFA: AIX 64-bit mega-patch

[Nick Duffek <nsd at redhat dot com>]

On 9-Jun-2000, Andrew Cagney wrote:

>Drop a tag before the commit.

Thanks for the suggestion, I'll do that.

>It may be possible to carve up this patch and get some of it in
>immediatly.  I guess, wait and see.

I took a stab at cutting it into parts, but it's very interdependent.  The
binutils folks were responsive the last time I submitted patches, so I'm
hopeful that it won't be long.

>The theory is that, eventully, an architecture will be bound to each
>``thread''.

A ``thread'' would be the usual execution object from a process or a core
file?

On the topic of multi-arch debugging, I've been wondering about a couple
of other things:

  1. When there's no process and no core file, should the architecture
     be inferred from the current target machine instead of from the
     object file?  This would avoid the potential confusion of multiple
     assembly formats or even languages, e.g.:

        $ gdb foo
        (gdb) disassemble main
        ... assembly language 1 ...
        (gdb) break main
        (gdb) run
        (gdb) disassemble main
        ... assembly language 2 ...

  2. Should the "set architecture" command be sticky?  If someone uses
     that command, they're probably dissatisfied with GDB's architecture
     inference, so they might not want GDB re-inferring the architecture
     every time they start a new inferior or load a new core file.

Thanks for the comments,

Nick