Syscall tracing

[Daniel Jacobowitz <drow at false dot org>]

On Thu, Jul 31, 2008 at 05:28:25PM -0700, Doug Evans wrote:
> I can imagine there being multiple applications that would like this
> info.  Can we start our own libstrace (or some such) and have gdb use
> that?

Once upon a time, there was going to be an strace2 and it was going to
work pretty much like this.  It never came to be, though :-(

In my opinion, the only important thing here is the data.  Strace has
a copy, but not in an extractable format; much of it is custom C.
What it needs is a more data-driven display format.  Then consumers
can do with it what they will.

Perhaps it could be done as C or at least C-like?  If GCC passed
special attributes into debug info, that'd be one way to produce
useful input to GDB describing the types.  Another way would be a
scripted parser for the necessary (very small) subset of C.

__bitwise_combinable enum open_flags_t {
  O_APPEND = 1,
  O_ASYNC = 2
};

int __fd_or_error open (const char *pathname __filename,
                        open_flags_t flags, mode_t mode);

-- 
Daniel Jacobowitz
CodeSourcery