Tracepoint support in Cygnus GDB ?

[Saravanan]

Hi All,

     I was reading the GDB manual and realized that
  there is,practically, no tracepoint support provided
  by GDB since this support is available only for
  remote targets and for the latter , GDB doesn't provide any
  stub (like gdbserver) which has tracepoint support. I
  have a few doubts in mind regarding this :
  
  1. Why does GDB not provide this support for local
  host ?
  
  2. Is it not the case that the features (supposed to
  be) provided by tracepoints can be done using
  breakpoint features only (for instance , we can
  specify COMMANDS for  a breakpoint just as we can
  specify ACTIONS for tracepoints) ?
  
  3. Does tracepoint use the same TRAP (or ILLEGAL )
  instruction mechanism for tracepoints as it does for
  breakpoints? if not, what does it do?
  
  4. Does this trace support available in any other GDB
     supported by other vendors?
  
Regards,
Saravanan