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Re: [PATCH]: Make Linux use the new unified x86 watchpoint support
Date: Tue, 27 Mar 2001 08:51:10 -0800
From: Michael Snyder <msnyder@redhat.com>
Mark Kettenis wrote:
>
> Date: Tue, 27 Mar 2001 08:55:00 +0200 (IST)
> From: Eli Zaretskii <eliz@is.elta.co.il>
>
> On Mon, 26 Mar 2001, Michael Snyder wrote:
>
> > Guys, this implementation has problems. You have it hard-coded
> > so that on a linux host, it unconditionally calls native linux
> > methods involving ptrace to get the debug registers. This breaks
> > very badly if you're using a native linux host to debug a remote
> > i386 target.
>
> Just like the old implementation. I suspect the old implementation
> just happened to work because it didn't do any strict error checking.
No, you're on the wrong track. I haven't looked at how the old
implementation worked, but the problem with the new implementation
is _not_ the perror call. It's the ptrace call that preceeds it.
You can't call ptrace if the process you're debugging is remote.
Did you actually try my patch? I just did, using gdbserver (which by
the way needs some fixing for Linux/x86, I'll see what I can do), and
it seems to fix the problems for me. Note that it isn't really a
problem to call ptrace if the process you're debugging is remote.
You'll just call ptrace on untraced (and possibly non-existing)
process, and it will fail with ESRCH.
> The fundamental problem is that the watpoint-stuff isn't part of the
> target vector.
Yes, you're absolutely right about this. This is why I don't
like ptrace calls being made from outside of the target vector.
Me neither, but this seems a reasonable temporary workaround for the
problem, especially since GDB has been doing something similar for
quite some time.
Mark