Re: [remote protocol] step range?

[Daniel Jacobowitz <drow at false dot org>]

On Fri, Sep 05, 2008 at 05:16:15PM -0700, Jason Molenda wrote:
> For what it's worth we use the remote protocol for debugging applications 
> on the iPhone / iPod Touch devices.  When we first got it up and running, 
> we saw command-line level "step" commands taking multiple (4-5!) seconds 
> to complete.  We optimized it to no end and got this down to something 
> like .2 seconds without doing anything too weird to the protocol.  We 
> didn't have any single-instruction-step feature so we didn't even consider 
> trying to push range-stepping down to the device.

I find this somewhat surprising - you don't need nearly as much of a
disassembler to do this for ARM as it sounds like from your comments.
I've written the code at least twice now, and for pre-Thumb-2 targets
it's quite straightforward.  And it saves enough round trips to be
a win, as long as you have somewhere closer to the target that can run
it.

> Since we've established that you must have single-instruction-step  
> capability in the target to do this, I think it's safe to assume that  
> only the current continue thread will execute.

Well, in hosted environments the hardware single step bit is often
context-switched; e.g. %eflags.  Or in multi-core systems there may
actually be one per 'thread'.

-- 
Daniel Jacobowitz
CodeSourcery