RFC: Add native support for Linux SH

[John Paul Adrian Glaubitz <glaubitz at physik dot fu-berlin dot de>]

Hi!

I have picked up an old patch which was posted to this mailing list
in 2011 [1] which adds native GDB support for Linux SuperH (SH).

Since this patch was never merged for various reasons, it gained
dust and needed some work to be usable with current versions of
GDB again.

I have taken the patch and forward-ported it to the current version
of GDB from git master. I have tested it on my SH7785LCR SuperH
hardware on Debian unstable and I was able to debug simple C
programs. I have not thoroughly tested the functionality, however.

With this post, I would like to ask for some feedback on how to
proceed with this patch. The original author of the patch is
Takashi Yoshii who wrote it while working at Renesas Electronics
in Japan.

Back in 2011, one of the major show-stoppers why the patch was
not merged was apparently the missing FSF copyright assignment
by the author [2]. However, since Yoshii-san was working for
Renesas back then, I think the copyright assignment would have
to be signed by them and not him personally. And since Renesas
has already contributed various SuperH code to various FSF
projects like gcc and binutils, I'd assume that the necessary
FSF copyright assignment has already been signed.

I have also asked Yutaka Niibe (CC'ed) to try to get into touch
with Takashi Yoshii through his old connections at Renesas, in
case we would need some input from Yoshii-san's side.

As for the technical part: I'm happy to take any feedback and
improve the patch so it has reached the necessary quality to
be able to get merged into GDB mainline.

Having native GDB support for Linux SH has become relevant
again since the SuperH architecture is currently being
redeveloped as the J-Core open source architecture [3].

Thanks,
Adrian

> [1] http://www.cygwin.com/ml/gdb-patches/2011-11/msg00490.html
> [2] http://www.cygwin.com/ml/gdb-patches/2011-11/msg00499.html
> [3] http://j-core.org/

--
 .''`.  John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
: :' :  Debian Developer - glaubitz@debian.org
`. `'   Freie Universitaet Berlin - glaubitz@physik.fu-berlin.de
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