Re: disable gdbserver for cross builds

[Kevin Buettner <kevinb at cygnus dot com>]

On Sep 27,  1:30pm, Michael Snyder wrote:

> Philip Blundell wrote:
> > 
> > I didn't get any response to my mail of Sep 9 (to the gdb list) on this topic,
> > so I'd like to propose the following patch.
> 
> I don't understand the motivation for the patch.
> Gdbserver is currently built only when needed
> (ie. not for cross-debuggers).

One could argue that it would be more (most?) useful for gdbserver to
be built as part of a cross debugger.  E.g, suppose you were building
gdb for Linux/x86 cross Solaris/Sparc.  In this setting, it would be
really handy to be able to also build a Solaris/Sparc gdbserver at the
same time.

The argument is even more compelling when you substitute Solaris/Sparc
in the above example with some platform which does not yet have a
native port of gdb.  I ran into this situation when I did the port for
the IA-64.  I had (thanks to HP) an IA-64 simulator which ran Linux.
It turned out to be more convenient (for a number or reasons) to do
a Linux/IA-32 cross Linux/IA-64 port first and use gdbserver on the
simulator.  But building gdbserver for Linux/IA-64 was tricky since
there was no native port of gdb yet.  I ended up configuring gdbserver
for Linux/IA-32 and then fixed the links for tm.h, etc. by hand.  (There
may have been some makefile editing that was necessary too; I don't
recall anymore.)

If gdbserver has any future at all, it'd be nice if these problems
were fixed so that it could be built as the "stub" portion of a cross
debugger.

Kevin