Re: [discuss] Process record -- save and restore to a file

[Michael Snyder <msnyder at vmware dot com>]

Greg Law wrote:
> Michael Snyder wrote:
> > Greg Law wrote:
> > > Michael Snyder wrote:
> > > > [..]
> > > >
> > > > Secondly, I have a suggestion about the command names.
> > > > How about
> > > >   record save <filename>
> > > >   record restore <filename>
> > > > instead of
> > > >   record dump <filename>
> > > >   record load <filename>
> > > >
> > > > What do you guys think?
> > > UI looks good to me, too.
> > >
> > > Would we expect these commands to be reflected over the remote 
> > > protocol if a remote target were using reverse debugging?
> > No, just as with core files, we've never made the final effort
> > to get gdb to suck all the information out of the remote target.
> >
> > And since this feature involves saving a core file, you can
> > imagine how much data we would be transporting.
> >
> > If we did corefiles first, I don't imagine it would be too hard
> > to get the rest of this to work.
>
> Oh, I wasn't imagining sucking the entire record log from the remote 
> target into gdb.  I was thinking of driving the saving/restoring of 
> remote logs from gdb itself.  So say you have gdb attached to a 
> reversible debugging session on VMware or UndoDB or Simics or whatever, 
> you could issue 'record save' and have the backend dump its log to disk 
> in some format the backend understands.  Likewise 'record restore' would 
> cause send a packet to the backend causing the backend to suck in the 
> logfile.  The various backends could probably have their own interfaces 
> to do this stuff, but it would seem nicer to have a "proper" interface 
> for this at the gdb level.

Ah, I see.  Yeah, that might be a good idea.
In my mind, the deciding factor (whether it's
worth doing) would be, could we get like three
back-end maintainers to agree on what would be
a useful syntax / semantics for them.

Say, you, VirtuTech and VMware?

There are probably a lot of other backend-specific things
that we could agree to do if they were common enough, but
that might be best done with monitor commands if not.