Getting the i386 watchpoints into the taget vector?

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Thu, 19 Sep 2002 21:57:40 -0400
> From: Andrew Cagney <ac131313@ges.redhat.com>
> 
> Instead of using a system interface, the i386 manipulates the
> hardware watchpoint registers directly.

Really?  What I see is that most i386 ports use ptrace or similar
interfaces to access the hardware watchpoints.  So in what sense is
this manipulation ``direct''?

> One thought is to change the config/i386/nm-i386.h macros to something 
> native specific (native_insert_watchpoint()) and then have the various 
> native targets (infptrace.c, ...) add these methods to their target vector.
> 
> It does restrict things to native targets.  A remote target couldn't 
> make use of GDB's built-in knowledge of watchpoint registers.
> 
> Another (less well thought out) idea, is for the target stack, to fall 
> back to the ``native watchpoint'' mechanism when the [remote] target 
> doesn't support watchpoints. I think this would mean putting the 
> ``native watchpoint'' methods in the architecture vector where the 
> target vector code could call it.

Why not simply allow remote targets define the watchpoint-related
macros?  Let their definitions issue remote packets that will cause
the target end DTRT.  As long as the target is a i386-compatible
machine, the internal bookkeeping we have in the current code will
work.

Am I missing something?