Using GDB to debug ia64 files

["Vincent Girard-Reydet" <vincent dot girard-reydet at bull dot net>]

Hi people of Cygwin & GDB,

I'm trying to do some quite complicated debug stuff with Cygwin, and can't
find how to do it. Would someone know how to help me ?
Here is the problem :

I have a BIOS compiled with the VC++ compiler for ia64. This BIOS is EFI
(www.intel.com/technology/efi/) based.
The BIOS is compiled under Windows, and it's a mandatory because some tools
I'm using have not been ported to Linux.
The BIOS is compiled in debug mode, thus generating Windows paths to the
debug files (PDB format) in the image.

I've written a GDB stub in my BIOS. What I wish is to use GDB on Cygwin to
communicate with this stub and debug my BIOS.
What I don't know is :
 - does GDB support COFF format and PDB format ? I guess the first is "yes",
and I read a thread on this archive about PDB format. I'm not sure GDB does
understand it, but then I would add the PDB support to GDB. Does someone
have doc about it (if the rest of the stuff is possible, of course), and
know how long a process this can be ?

 - supposing I have GDB understanding both PDB and COFF format (or if I can
make VC generate a debug file format that GDb can understand), will I be
able to use it to debug my BIOS ? Or will GDB/Cygwin crash because if the
Windows Paths ?

 - does GDB/Cygwin have a goog ia64 support ? I think GDB/Linux has been
ported to ia64. Has this port been done to GDB/Cygwin ? If not, would it be
long to transcript it from GDB/Linux to GDB/Cygwin ?

Thank you for your answers, may they be as precise as possible !

Vincent Girard-Reydet
-------------
Happy people are not in a hurry.


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