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Re: [patch] Add QNX remote protocol headers.


Daniel Jacobowitz wrote:

On Mon, Sep 12, 2005 at 09:11:35AM -0400, Kris Warkentin wrote: > Well, I don't know about "can't". We support debugging of i386, sh,
> mips, arm and powerpc from Windows, Linux, Solaris and self-hosted
> Neutrino and have for many years using this code. I definitely agree
> with you that the gdb remote protocol is far more portable and that
> passing structures around isn't the safest way to do things. This is,
> however, the way pdebug has always been defined and provided everyone is
> using gcc, everything works fine.
>
> Basically, I'm acknowledging the limitations of this code and hoping
> that, with certain changes and cleanup, you might consider accepting it
> anyway. Several points: 1) It's a tried and tested solution that has
> been in the field supported by us for more than half a decade. 2) It
> doesn't actually have anything to do with any other gdb mechanisms. > Completely self contained. If we broke anything, it would only be our
> own stuff. 3) In order to make it completely portable, I'd most likely
> have to avoid passing structures completely and totally re-write the
> entire protocol and server.


That's all well and good, but you've missed my point.  I'm not
complaining about you passing structures around.  I'm complaining about
you using structures on the host side to unpack them.

Here's how it goes: you are contributing support for a new remote
target to GDB.  That means you get to pick the target.  So you can pick
32-bit targets with standard packing (well, depending on the content of
the structure, the ARM padding rules may bite you; I'll assume from
your description that this isn't a problem).

But that new code has no inherent _host_ dependency.  It's not
acceptable to take it and say "here's some non-portable code that will
only work on x86, sparc, and neutrino".  I can guarantee you that, if
it's in FSF GDB, someone is eventually going to try upgrading to x86_64
and notice when the pieces all fall apart.

Passing structures is one thing.  Decoding them by dumping binary blobs
into host-side structures is an entirely different thing.  But wait!
Fortunately you're working in a debugger with lots of infrastructure
for cross-debugging environments!  It'll be a little bulkier, but
there's nothing unsolvable about it.


I think I might be seeing your point. Rather than reading/writing a structure with, say, memcpy, we go through it one field at a time and extract/insert the data based on size and offset? That doesn't sound completely horrible. Is there a good example in the code of an elegant way to do that? I can think of many ways but might there be a 'gdb approved' mechanism?


> >And whatever this does:
> >
> >> #ifdef __QNX__
> >> __BEGIN_DECLS
> >> #include <_pack64.h>
> >> #endif
> >
> >is similarly not OK. If it's intended to work cross, then it should
> >work from everywhere, not just from x86 and QNX.
> >
>
> That's easy enough to fix.
>
> >I think I need a mile-high explanation of what you're trying to do,
> >first. By the way, is pdebug publically documented?
> >
>
> I hope I've more or less explained it above. I want to submit a
> self-contained patch for our remote protocol that, while not the most
> portable of solutions, will not interfere with anything else. As far as


I don't speak for everyone here, but I'm really not interested in
adding non-portable target code to GDB.  Non-portable native code,
sure...

> documentation goes, the descriptions within the headers and source files
> are just about it. Gdb blocks on the remote which eventually sends back
> a reply stating the type of event that occurred after which gdb gathers
> whichever information it needs and issues commands back to the target. > There's a separate channel for I/O. Fairly simple all told.


Trust me, nothing is ever simple about this sort of thing.  I was
hoping there was a manual, but if you don't have one either, we can
make to with what we've got.

The reason I'm so interested, both in documentation and in portability,
is that you've got a working remote protocol with channels.  There's a
lot of incentive to leverage that for other targets.


I see. Well, I suppose I could also talk to my management about releasing the source code for the pdebug server as well. It's actually fairly clean and modular. Having both a host and target implementation of the protocol would probably clarify things. I don't know if they're interested in doing that but we've open-sourced a lot of Eclipse stuff so I imagine there is a precedent.


[I didn't spend much time looking at the attachment.  Overall nothing
jumped out at me except the binary blobs on the wire issue.]


Alright. I thought you just didn't like structures being passed at all. If all I need to do is come up with pack/unpack methods, it might not be too bad.


cheers,

Kris


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