Re: [microblaze-uclinux] GDB with uClinux

[John Williams <jwilliams@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Walt,

White, Walt J (GE Infrastructure) wrote:


> I wanted to briefly recap and then ask a couple more questions:
> 
> first, the goal:  I'd like to be able to use the XPS software debug environment for debugging my target application running under uClinux on a custom target board.

This should be possible - at the very least you may need to start gdb 
from outside the XPS.  However, it is possible to use the mb-gdb GUI as 
expected, and in a consistent way.

> what's working:  I can cross-compile my target application from a RedHat box and take the output file, 'pImage.romfs', and load it into the target memory via TFTP through a tcpip connection.  From here I can execute the application, which generally works as designed so far, such as prints to a console, etc...

OK, a good baseline.

> next steps:  My understanding is that I need to include your new (alpha or beta mb) gdbserver application as one of my target applications so it can run on the target and connect to the main GDB running under XPS.  I also may need to use a tweaked version of the mb-gdb as well. 

Yes.  I looked into this yesterady, I've found my modified copy of the 
gdbserver application, unfortuantely it didn't work straight from thhe 
box.  I didn't have enough time to discover why, but I will keep working 
on it.

As for the modified gdb - again I have to recheck and confirm.  It was 
12 months ago when we did this work, and so things are a little hazy.

Application debug support is important, and your email has motivated me 
to clean it up once and for all :)

> questions:  Will all the source code for the uClinux distribution, along with my application code need to be loaded into a 'software application' project in XPS?  Were you able to find out anymore about the tools I'll need?  Has anyone else done this successfully yet, and are there any other resources I can tap?

Your application will appear to gdb in the same way that it would if you 
where running GDB on a desktop machine.  So no, you just debug your 
aplication - you would haev to run two copies of gdb side-by-side, one 
on the app, the other on the kernel, if you want to trace down into the 
kernel.  I see no reason why this wouldn't work, if you needed it.

when debugging an application, you can single step through its source 
code, inspect registers, memory, local vars etc.  It works mostly how 
you would expect.

If you tried single stepping from the application down into a kernel 
system call, I have no idea what would happen, but it's unlikely to do 
what you expect!

I hope to have something working by the end of next week - stay tuned.

Regards,

John


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