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Xcode and cross-platform debugging
- From: "Dr. Rolf Jansen" <rolf dot anroni at gmail dot com>
- To: gdb at sourceware dot org
- Date: Sun, 6 Jul 2008 14:28:22 -0300
- Subject: Xcode and cross-platform debugging
I had the need of cross-platform debugging using GDB + Xcode/Mac OS X
at the host platform, targeting a Cocotron application on Windows XP.
I worked on it and succeeded.
Since Xcode cross-platform debugging is a very specific need, I did
not and still do not want to bother this mailing list too much with
it. At least, I wanted to give you a chance to think about whether
some of my work might be interesting for the main line or not. Anyway,
here comes a short description what has been done so far.
I found out, that the MI dialects of Xcode and GNU GDB diverged in the
past few years very much, and that there was no easy way to make Xcode
and cross-platform debugging with GNU GDB work without major code
changes. So, I started to work on it, by forking GNU gdb
6.8.50.20080428-cvs.
After some initial trials and failures, I figured out that the best
approach for achieving my goal would be to add another machine
interpreter to the present GNU GDB. Therefore, based on GNU mi, I
added the new machine interpreter for Xcode that I called "miX". I
then deliberately mixed in the missing code and/or essential changes
from Apple GDB-956/960/961. Besides this, I needed to make only some
minor changes on the other parts of GNU GDB.
To make a long story short, I succeeded. Xcode cross-platform
debugging works very well now, and I am going to make the cross
debugger available to the Cocotron community - http://www.cocotron.com.
In order not to violate the terms of the GPLv3, I set up everything
(including the complete history of changes since the initial fork) as
a project at Google Code - http://code.google.com/p/xcxdb/.
Best regards
Rolf Jansen