Re: [rfc/rfa] [4/4] SPU enhancements: GDB/MI extensions

["Ulrich Weigand" <uweigand at de dot ibm dot com>]

Daniel Jacobowitz wrote:
> On Sat, Jun 02, 2007 at 09:34:01PM +0200, Ulrich Weigand wrote:
> > Hello,
> > 
> > this patch makes the new "info spu" commands available via the GDB/MI
> > protocol.  The Cell Broadband Engine IDE is already able to make use
> > of these commands and display the SPU status information.
> > 
> > It looks like these are the first platform-specific MI commands, so
> > I'd appreciate opinions on this ...
> 
> The documentation doesn't say what the output should be; we need that
> for consumers to parse it usefully.  Does it get MI-tabulated?  If
> not, there's always -interpreter-exec.

It depends, some "info spu" commands return just a couple of values,
others return a table, yet others some values followed by a table.

I agree we need to document the format, at least provide examples.
Sorry for omitting that ...

> I mentioned in an earlier message that it would be nice if this sort
> of output was more generic, so that it could come straight from a
> target description file without a lot of tdep code.  That's easy to
> put off to another day, but the same thing applies to GDB's
> conversation with consumers.  Is there some less target-specific way
> that we can present this information?  For instance, a way that an IDE
> could automatically pick up all the target-specific data that GDB
> knows about without the IDE having to know about all of it also.
> 
> That doesn't mean the IDE can't know about it too, of course, to
> provide more specialized access.

That might be a good idea in general, but in this particular case,
preparing the data requires quite a bit of effort and knowledge of
the data format.  I'm not sure I'd want to describe the effects of,
say, info_spu_dma_cmdlist in XML.  I also want to avoid having to
duplicate that processing in GDB and the IDE ...

> If we do go ahead with these new commands I suggest you add a test
> case for them.

Right, sorry about that.

Bye,
Ulrich

-- 
  Dr. Ulrich Weigand
  GNU Toolchain for Linux on System z and Cell BE
  Ulrich.Weigand@de.ibm.com