GDB now takes 4 minutes to start up with remote gdbserver target

[Sandra Loosemore]

On 07/28/2015 04:13 PM, Pedro Alves wrote:
> On 07/24/2015 06:18 PM, Sandra Loosemore wrote:
>
>> It used to print a helpful message
>> suggesting using "set sysroot" if the user wants the shared library
>> information, instead of hanging on startup with no indication of what
>> the trouble is or how to fix it.  I can't see the new default behavior
>> as an improvement over the old.
>
> I fully agree that those should be fixed.  If GDB had warned giving a
> "set sysroot" suggestion, and the slow retrieval was cancelable, would we
> be discussing the new default?
>

I think that would be about 1000 times better than the current 
situation.  One mild concern I have is that if "set sysroot" with no 
arguments is the recommended way to restore the old behavior, IIUC old 
versions of GDB give an error on that form of the command.  So, if you 
have startup scripts, IDE-based launchers, documentation, etc that need 
to support multiple versions of GDB, is there a backward-compatible 
command that works everywhere to get the old behavior, if that's what 
you want?  Perhaps the GDB manual should explicitly document that 
instead of/in addition to plain "set sysroot".

I'd also like to see the manual be more explicit that transferring files 
from the target can be slow and it is recommended to make a copy 
available on the host.  And, I think the language currently in the 
manual that libraries on the target can be stripped as long as libraries 
on the host aren't needs to be tweaked, since this makes no sense if the 
default is to get the potentially-stripped libraries from the target anyway.

-Sandra