Re: A couple of suggestions/questions

[James Ingham <jingham at cygnus dot com>]

Tom,

 > It would be nice if the pop-up view of a variables was available when
 > viewing inline C++ functions that are in header files.  I end up doing a
 > View->Local Variables to get around this missing feature.

I don't understand what you want here?  Do you want a popup on the
main source window, along with the File & Function box, or what?

 > 
 > For some reason the source file list does not contain the assembly language
 > files that went into the executable.  Only the headers, C, and C++ files
 > are in the list.  Is this a limitation of gdb?

This is a limitation of the assembler you are using.  It has to put
the correct file symbol into the debug information, or gdb will never
read it.  Gas on the Sun, for instance, does not include this
information even if you do -g.  There is not much gdb can do if the
symbol information is not there.

 > 
 > I would like to have a gdb.ini file that would allow me to attach to my
 > remote target without any gui interaction but I can't seem to figure it
 > out.  Is there a way to set the baudrate from the init file?  Is there a
 > way to specify that breakpoints should NOT be set at main() and exit()?

You can set the GUI preferences (like break at main) in three ways.
One is by setting up the UI the way you want and then closing the app
down.  This should save the preferences in the .gdbtkinit file (gdbtk.ini
for the Windows folks) in your home directory.  If something doesn't
get saved, that is a bug.

You can also edit the .gdbtkinit file by hand.  You can figure out
what the entries mean by looking in the sources, in particular, grep
for "pref define" in the gdb/gdbtcl2 directory of the sources, this
will show you what is there, and there are some comments to help you
out a bit.

Finally, you can run tcl code in the gdb.ini file (or from the console
for that matter), using the "tk" command.  Just put in: 

tk pref set gdb/load/main 0

for instance to turn off breaking at main.  This is probably not the
best way to handle startup code, however, as it will cause errors when
you run gdb -nw, since the tk command only exists in GUI mode.  To
avoid this difficulty, you can instead pass gdb a command file through
the command line using:

gdb --tclcommand file.tcl

which will start up Insight, and then source in the file "file.tcl".
This code will be passed straight to the tcl interpreter, however, so
you must leave off the "tk".

You can also use this to do stuff like connect automatically when you
start up.  You will have to hunt around in the Tcl code to find out
which Tcl procedure does what you want.  The best way to do this is to
find the menu item that does what you want, and seeing what its
-command option is.

 > 
 > We are using it as a kernel level debugger and would like to view the
 > supervisor level registers of the PowerPC from the View->Registers window.
 > Is there a magic incantation that would allow me to do this or do I have to
 > modify some insight code?

This is a gdb internal issue, not an Insight issue.  Insight just
finds out all the registers that gdb knows about, and shows you those.
Look at the function gdb_regnames in gdbtk-cmds.c for the details.
You will have to teach gdb how to view the registers you want, then
Insight will view them automatically...

Hope this helps,

Jim

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Jim Ingham                                              jingham@cygnus.com
Cygnus Solutions Inc.