Dr. Dobb's | A Hardware Architecture Independent Implementation of GDB Tracepoints for Linux

A Hardware Architecture Independent Implementation of GDB Tracepoints for Linux

A tool for debugging of applications -- especially in distributed environments

July 04, 2007
URL:http://www.drdobbs.com/open-source/a-hardware-architecture-independent-impl/200900429

SISE, Lanzhou University
Tianshui South Road 222, Lanzhou, Gansu, 7300000 P.R.China
[email protected], [email protected]

The problem of debugging applications in the value domain without halting execution due to temporal constraints imposed by components not under control of the debugged process is as only as IPC and networking. This problem does not have a simply single solution, but rather the solution depends heavily on the particular problem.

Developing and thus debugging code that needs to ensure operation within well defined temporal bounds mandates tools to record the value domain without halting execution. This class of applications thus falls into the definition of real-time applications where the program’s correctness depends on its time behavior. One possibility of relatively unobtrusively recording arbitrary values of an application during its execution are GDB tracepoints.

In this paper we describe our implementation and experience as well as limitations of the specification and our current implementation, followed by an outlook of future works we hope to continue.

This paper was originally presented at the Eighth Real-Time Linux Workshop held at the at the School for Information Science and Engineering, Lanzhou University, in Lanzhou, China.

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