Re: cross-debugging of userland core files, nat -> tdep

[Michael Snyder <msnyder at redhat dot com>]

Daniel Jacobowitz wrote:
> 
> On Wed, Apr 10, 2002 at 06:39:18PM -0700, Jason R Thorpe wrote:
> > Hi folks...
> >
> > I've been thinking of what needs to happen in order to support
> > cross-debugging of userland core files in NetBSD.
> >
> > BFD can already handle NetBSD ELF core files in the appropriate way.  As
> > far as I can tell, the only stumbling block is getting GDB to play nicely
> > with them.
> >
> > The problem is that the functions that supply registers, etc. from the core
> > file are all in "nat" modules.  This is probably mostly an artifact of the
> > data being in the same format as the reg structure returned by ptrace(2).
> >
> > What I'd like to do is move those supply-registers routines into an
> > appropriate "tdep" file.  They can still be used by the "nat" routines
> > which use ptrace(2), and all the core file handling goo can then go into
> > the "tdep" module, as well.
> >
> > If this sounds reasonable, then I'll start my little project.  Otherwise,
> > I'd love to hear suggestions :-)
> 
> Hit the nail on the head.  I believe I've gotten BFD to understand ELF
> core files appropriately for a fair number of targets; you may need to
> add a platform-specific chunk to all the ones I didn't get to.  Then
> move supply_* out of the nat files, and link in the core code.
> 
> Now, if you've got time, there's a much better way to do this.  The
> "magic" supply_* and fetch_* names need to go; we should instead have a
> table of regset types, sizes, and fetch/supply functions.  I just
> haven't gotten around to actually doing that.

Nathaniel, I will kiss your feet if you will do that.  ;-)
That would mean I could pretty easily implement the gcore command
for embedded gdb.