Re: Available registers as a target property

[Daniel Jacobowitz <drow at false dot org>]

On Fri, May 06, 2005 at 06:46:38PM -0400, Paul Schlie wrote:
> > Daniel Jacobowitz wrote:
> > ...
> > Today, the contents of the register cache and the layout of GDB's regnum
> > space are determined by the gdbarch.  There are several hooks for this,
> > primarily these three:
> >
> >        num_regs
> >        register_name
> >        register_type
> >
> > The gdbarch determines what raw registers are available.  But this isn't a
> > perfect match with what raw registers are _really_ available, because the
> > gdbarch only has the clues we use to select a gdbarch available: things like
> > byte order and BFD machine number.  At best, those tell us what registers
> > the binary we're debugging requires.  The runtime set of registers we can
> > see are a property of the target, not of the gdbarch.
> > ...
> 
> Might it be more appropriate to enable gdbarch to be extended to enable the
> more specific description of a particular target component and mode; as
> opposed to pushing the requirement of a target to provide detailed register
> etc. information about itself when all that should be necessary should be
> for it to more specifically identify itself and present mode if any, thereby
> enabling a correspondingly more precise gdbarch description to be selected
> as the basis of it's logically visible model?

Do you have a concrete suggestion?  This sounds not fundamentally
different from what I am doing.

-- 
Daniel Jacobowitz
CodeSourcery, LLC