Hi all, I've been working on a platform-independent system for executables and shared libraries to export information to debuggers and other software development tools. It's called Infinity. The initial use case was to allow GDB to debug multithreaded inferiors without requiring libthread_db, but if that all works it's likely this stuff will be added to glibc to allow debuggers to support dlmopen too, and I'm hoping the OpenMP community will get on board too (they are currently proposing another libthread_db-style interface. So, I'm sending this email so it doesn't come as a complete surprise.
The idea is basically that, rather than requiring a plugin library that the debugger loads, in Infinity inspection functions are shipped as DWARF bytecode in ELF notes in the actual library they are for, so, e.g., the notes implementing what libthread_db.so currently implements will live in libpthread.so. The idea is that the debugger keeps a track of the notes it finds in the executables and libraries it loads, and when complete sets arrive it enables that particular subsystem, so, when the notes needed to support multithreaded inferiors appear then thread debugging switches on. I just mailed an RFC to the glibc list with notes implementing map_lwp2thr function to get some feedback. The series starts here: https://sourceware.org/ml/libc-alpha/2015-10/msg00690.html This series is to build the notes, not to execute them--it's nothing to do with debuggers--so it should be ok to look without fear of having seen LGPL code you can't then implement. IANAL though :) I'm currently documenting the system on the GDB wiki, starting here: https://sourceware.org/gdb/wiki/Infinity That won't be its final home, it's just somewhere convenient for now. The documentation is by no means complete but I'll be filling it in over the next few days, and most of the important concepts have at least placeholder pages so if you subscribe to those you'll get emails as I write. Infinity's mailing list is infin...@sourceware.org, so please subscribe if you're interested (by sending an empty message to infinity-subsribe@). Cheers, Gary -- http://gbenson.net/ _______________________________________________ lldb-dev mailing list lldb-dev@lists.llvm.org http://lists.llvm.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/lldb-dev
