Re: problems with gdb (specifically linuxthreads)

[Mark Kettenis <kettenis at wins dot uva dot nl>]

   Date: Fri, 18 Feb 2000 18:30:00 -0500
   From: Greg Galperin <grg22@ai.mit.edu>
   Content-Type: text

   Mark Kettenis wrote:
   > As for the "many linuxthreads problems": would you please tell us what
   > they are.  Apart from the spurious SIGTRAPs I'm not aware of any.

   Well, for one there is the zombie problem I reported a couple weeks ago at

   http://sourceware.cygnus.com/ml/bug-gdb/2000-02/msg00008.html

Hmm, looks like the lin-thread.c cannot handle a thread doing
pthread_exit() at all :-(.  And that's keeping me from reproducing
your zombie bug.

   (Is the bug-gdb mailing list no longer used?  Nobody seemed to notice that
   posting at all.)

I'm not subscribed to that list (I'm on too many lists already :), and
the S/N ratio is quite high (most bug reports there are really
useless).  Anyway, I'll see if I can add this to the list of know problems.

   I can probably act as a pretty good stress tester for x86 linux pthreads
   code... I've never been able to run any gdb on the application I'm working
   on (and would desperately like to).  I've tried 4.17, 4.18, HJ Lu's 4.17,
   current dev branches from dec, jan, and feb; applied all the patches I can
   find which seem at all relevant, have done some hacking myself, and none of
   these actually let me debug my application.  (BTW, as noted in my other
   email, this application does work, does have bugs, but runs for days
   outside of gdb.)  I've also tried a glibc 2.1.3 in addition to my standard
   2.1.2 with no difference noticed.  If you think you have a setup which
   works for x86 linux pthreads, bring it on!!

Not really.  I'd like to fix the lin-thread.c code though, such that GDB 5.0 in
combination with glibc 2.1.3 will work reasonably well.  Work on HJ
Lu's 4.17 and working around bugs in glibc before 2.1.3, as well as
working on the linux-thread.c code that is only used in the
non-libthread_db-assisted case is a waste of time IMHO.  Your help
would be greatly appreciated.  You know you can debug gdb with gdb
itself?

Mark