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The GNU GDB Debugger and NetBSD (Part 2)



The NetBSD team of developers maintains two copies of GDB:

    One in the base-system with a stack of local patches.
    One in pkgsrc with mostly build fix patches.

The base-system version of GDB (GPLv3) still relies on a set of local
patches. I set a goal to reduce the local patches to bare minimum,
ideally reaching no local modifications at all.

Over the past month I've reimplemented debugging support for
multi-threaded programs and upstreamed the support. It's interesting to
note that the old support relied on GDB tracking only a single inferior
process. This caused the need to reimplement the support and be agnostic
to the number of traced processes. Meanwhile the upstream developers
introduced new features for multi-target tracing and a lot of
preexisting code broke and needed resurrection. This affected also the
code kept in the GDB basesystem version. Additionally over the past 30
days, I've also developed new CPU-independent GDB features that were for
a long time on a TODO list for NetBSD.

After the past month NetBSD has now a decent and functional GDB support
in the mainline. It's still not as featured as it could and CPU-specific
handling will need a dedicated treatment.

Plan for the next milestone

Finish and upstream operational support of follow-fork, follow-vfork and
follow-spawn events. Rewrite the gdbserver support and submit upstream.

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