Date: Tue, 20 Oct 2015 13:36:28 -0700 From: John Baldwin <jhb@freebsd.org> To: 'freebsd-arch' <freebsd-arch@freebsd.org> Subject: Retiring in-tree GDB Message-ID: <2678091.es0AGJQ0Ou@ralph.baldwin.cx>
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When this topic was last raised (by Warner I believe), the primary objection (certainly my main one) was that the in-tree kgdb was the only kernel debugger available. kgdb is now available via the devel/gdb port in ports (and as of last week was enabled by default, so 'pkg install gdb' will get you a kgdb binary). The kgdb in ports is in general superior to the one in the base system. It is a cross debugger by default (and with my pending patches to libkvm it even supports cross debugging of vmcores). There are some issues still with devel/gdb: namely it does not currently support some of the platforms supported by our in tree gdb such as arm and mips. For these platforms I think the in-tree gdb will need to remain until there is a suitable alternative. However, I would like to propose that we retire the in-tree GDB for some of our platforms (namely x86) for 11. In particular, I think we should default to enabling lldb and disabling gdb for platforms that meet the following criteria: 1) devel/gdb works including thread and kgdb support 2) lldb works We could perhaps be more aggressive and handle lldb and gdb toggles independently, but I think we want to ship some sort of userland debugger out of the box on all of our platforms. The question I think might be if we end up with platforms where 1) is true but 2) is not (such as powerpc). I believe that these conditions are only true for x86 currently. Comments? -- John Baldwin
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