Tracing Well With Others: Integration of GDB Tracepoints Into Trace Tools

Stan Shebs, Mentor Graphics

Abstract

The tracepoint facility in the GNU Debugger (GDB) was originally developed as a high-powered debugging feature, for use in diagnosing problems when the program could not be stopped in the traditional breakpoint-and-single-step fashion. Although it works as advertised, it is complicated to set up, and does not see much use.

In this talk I will review the state of GDB tracepoints, and discuss some ways to make tracepoints more accessible, including the adoption of the Common Trace Format (CTF), more and better interface in Eclipse, and interoperation with dedicated trace tools such as System Analyzer and the Tracing and Monitoring Framework.

Biography

Stan Shebs has had open source as his day job since 1989, when a research colleague at Apple needed a compiler, and GCC 1.31 did the job. At Cygnus Support, Stan maintained GDB for the FSF and helped on many embedded tools projects, then returned to Apple to work on GCC and GDB for Mac OS X. Presently at CodeSourcery, now part of Mentor Graphics, he manages the team developing new features for GDB.