Re: what to do when upgrading Linux kernel

[Kevin Buettner <kevinb at cygnus dot com>]

On Feb 14, 11:04am, John Van Horne wrote:

> I'm hoping someone can help me with the following problem.
> 
> I've got Yellow Dog Linux, 2.2.18, and gdb 4.18. I install Linux kernel
> 2.4-test1, and
> gdb no longer works. When I try to debug a program, even a very simple
> "hello
> world" program, it says something like "Can't insert breakpoint -1. Can't
> access
> memory at 0x6c6c2c07".  If I link the test program statically, and try to
> run gdb on
> it, I get "Program received SIGTRAP Trace/Breakpoint signal. 0x6c6c2f7d in
> ??()".
> 
> I figure that I've got a library incompatibility problem. Do I need to
> recompile
> and reinstall glibc for the new kernel, and then recompile gdb? Will that be
> enough,
> or are there other steps one should take when upgrading a Linux kernel? 
> 
> I know that 2.4 test1 is not the latest 2.4 kernel available for the PPC.
> For reasons
> beyond my control, I'm stuck with it, at least for the near future. Is it
> possible that
> gdb simply won't run on this kernel?

gdb-4.18 is pretty old.  My recollection is that gdb-4.18 had a number
of problems on linux/ppc.  (Support for this platform had not been
officially integrated into gdb at this point.  Also, most of my
porting work for linux/ppc had been done wrt 4.16.) That said, if you
had a working gdb-4.18 that worked for you with a 2.4 kernel.  It
is possible that the ptrace interface may have been broken in one of
the earlier 2.4 kernels.  (You may wish to search the appropriate
lists to see if you can turn anything up.)

I suggest that you try one or more of the following...

    1) Upgrade to gdb-5.0 or build the current development sources.

    2) Obtain the latest Yellow Dog distribution and upgrade to that. 
       I don't know what kernel they're running now, but most likely
       they have a more recent gdb, one in which linux/ppc is
       officially supported..