[mingw gdb/mi] Separating debuggee output from MI

Noobody mail@noobody.org
Tue May 15 06:20:00 GMT 2012


I'm currently writing a gdb frontend using the GDB/MI interface, but I have
been experiencing difficulties with differentiating between output by the
debuggee and output from gdb itself.

The documentation mentions target-stream-output, which is prefixed with "@",
but it seems it is not actually being used. Instead, target output appears
interleaved with gdb output.

This can cause various problems, so I would like to be able to safely 
separate
target output/input from gdb output/input. Searching for a bit revealed that
this is quite a common problem when writing gdb frontends on windows due to
various limitations of the OS, but I was unable to find a good solution.

I implemented a workaround to this which seems to work, however I am not 
quite
sure whether it is safe to use.

What I'm doing right now is start the debuggee process in suspended mode 
from
the frontend (with CreateProcess and CREATE_SUSPENDED flag), create the gdb
process separately, attach it to the suspended process and then resume it
with ResumeThread (assuming a single-threaded program).

Something like this:

/* Start debug process */
CreateProcess(...)

/* Start gdb */
  gdb.exe -i mi
 >> -target-attach pid
<< *stopped
 >> -exec-continue
<< *running,thread-id="all"

/* Resume suspended process */
ResumeThread(...)

This seems to work, as I now have the debuggee input/output and the gdb
input/output in separate pipes. However, I have not had the chance to 
test this
any further, so I'm wondering - could this setup could cause any problems?
Especially the fact that I'm doing -exec-continue on a suspended process 
seems
like asking for trouble.

Thanks!
Benedikt Bitterli



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