x86 fpu

Kevin Buettner kevinb@cygnus.com
Thu Oct 21 11:19:00 GMT 1999


On Oct 21, 10:43am, Stan Shebs wrote:

>    Date: Thu, 21 Oct 1999 10:11:22 -0400 (EDT)
>    From: Kevin_Hendricks <khendricks@admin.ivey.uwo.ca>
> 
>    For example, before Kevin Buettner officially joined gdb, the powerpc camp was 
>    out on its own. Many months ago (a year?) we tried to get gdb to support PPC in 
>    gdb 4.17 by contributing a patch which was rejected since its author (Kevin 
>    Buettner) had not recently signed a copyright assignment (although he had in the 
>    past).  We requested the proper forms but nothing ever came from it.
> 
> Actually, all that did happen a while back - it ended up requiring
> some negotiation between Metrowerks' president and RMS (amusing to
> think about), since Kevin B was working for MW at the time.  I think
> we're all glad that MW, which might someday come to regard GDB as a
> competitor on LinuxPPC, does not have a legal way to interfere with
> its development...
> 
> I must confess I'm not up on the technical state of LinuxPPC patches
> however; I remember Kevin B wanting to make some further changes
> before incorporating.  Kevin?

I got my patches working with the head of the development tree several
weeks ago.  (Actually, Gary Thomas deserves a lot of the credit.)
However there are a great many similarities between rs6000-tdep.c and
the ppclinux-tdep.c.  I would really like to make the common parts
truly common as well as revamp it so that it uses the gdbarch
machinery, but this'll take more time than I have at the moment.  So
it might be better for me to commit what I have so that linux/ppc is
supported in the Cygnus tree.  Also, the longer I let my stuff sit,
the more likely it is that certain global changes will break what I
have working already.  (Because these global changes won't have
happened to the linux/ppc stuff.)

>    Meanwhile H.J. Lu's gdb included ppc support and even includes linuxthreads 
>    support (which finally made it possible for me to debug native_threads JDK's as 
>    part of the Blackdown effort). If I had waited for "official" support, all 
>    development would have ground to a halt long ago.
> 
>    Basically, H.J. Lu's tools have simply been a big help.   
>    His tools have filled a need that the GDB effort should have been filling.  If 
>    they had, there would have been no need for a splinter in the first place (as I 
>    think Stan pointed out).

I'll take this opportunity to agree with Kevin Hendricks regarding
HJ's Linux tools.  Even on Linux/x86 where there was some existing gdb
support in the FSF tree, HJ's splinter version of gdb made it possible
to debug multi-threaded programs on Linux.  When I was developing
Linux applications at Metrowerks, we appreciated this greatly and
would probably not have been able to complete our product in a timely
fashion without his splinter version.

Kevin


More information about the Gdb mailing list