Current and future GDB for ARM plans
Discusses the current state of GDB on ARM, what we're doing in the short term, and future areas to investiagte.
Note: may be a short session as the drafter is unavailable
Blueprint information
- Status:
- Not started
- Approver:
- None
- Priority:
- Undefined
- Drafter:
- Ulrich Weigand
- Direction:
- Needs approval
- Assignee:
- None
- Definition:
- New
- Series goal:
- None
- Implementation:
- Unknown
- Milestone target:
- None
- Started by
- Completed by
Whiteboard
1. GDB correctness
The main goals of this item are:
- GDB should pass its testsuite on ARM with no regressions compared to Intel
- Tested configurations: -marm / -mthumb, GCC 4.4 / 4.5 / 4.6, system debug info present / missing
- Stretch goal: no testsuite failures at all (either Intel or ARM)
Specific issues that are already identified and require fixing:
- Neon register support in core files (kernel support)
- Interrupted syscall handling (kernel support)
- signal handler stepping (kernel support)
- debug info for args in varargs routine (GCC support)
- C++ debug info fixes (GCC support)
- fix backtraces (support ARM unwind records, prologue parsing on Thumb-2)
- fix software watchpoints (improved epilogue detection)
2. GDB feature parity
The main goal of this item is to enable on ARM all GDB features that are available on other platforms, to the extent this is considered feasible and useful.
Specific features that fall into this category are:
- hardware breakpoint/
- non-stop mode / displaced stepping support on Thumb
- syscall tracing support
- record/replay support
- tracepoint support (gdbserver)