Re: Multiple inferiors and memory consumption

[Tom Tromey <tromey at redhat dot com>]

>>>>> "Volodya" == Vladimir Prus <vladimir@codesourcery.com> writes:

Volodya> That is, it does not seem like GDB notices that symbol tables
Volodya> of all 4 loaded executables are identical

Volodya> Is this something that is going to be improved upon in future?

I've been working on it off and on.

You can see my latest attempt, search for

    [0/17] RFC: share minimal symbols across objfiles

in the Dec 2011 archives.

There are some follow-up thoughts scattered through the subsequent
months.  The problem is reasonably hard -- those 17 patches only address
minsym sharing, but there is at least partial- and full-symbol sharing
to deal with as well; plus some other things making it harder (dlmopen
support, should we want it, makes a mess of it all).

Volodya> And now for my real question -- is there any case when using
Volodya> multi-process to debug several applications
Volodya> not related via parent-child relationship is better than running N
Volodya> copies of GDB?

Nothing today.

In the future they'll share debuginfo when possible, but that may be the
only advantage.

I've occasionally wondered whether we could have gdb fork when in MI
mode and it follows both parent and child.

Tom