Time for turning off gdb by default? Or worse...

[Warner Losh]

On Apr 8, 2014, at 3:24 PM, Steve Kargl <sgk at troutmask.apl.washington.edu> wrote:

> On Tue, Apr 08, 2014 at 02:34:35PM -0600, Warner Losh wrote:
> 
> (courtesy line wrap to something well below 80 characters)
> 
>> The gdb in the tree seems to be of very limited usefulness
>> these days. It doesn?t seem to work on clang-enabled
>> architectures w/o building -gdwarf-2, it doesn?t seem to work
>> with threaded applications, and on some architectures it
>> doesn?t seem to work at all (mips comes to mind, but it may
>> have been the two binaries I tried).
>> 
> 
> (patch removed)
> 
>> to the tree, which will turn gdb off by default.  It may make
>> more sense to just remove it entirely, but I?m not sure I want
>> to go there just yet in case there are things that I?m missing.
>> I believe that the port will be adequate for all architectures
>> we support, but haven?t tested this directly yet. I do know
>> that on amd64, the port just worked, where the in-tree gdb
>> was an epic fail.
> 
> I suppose the obvious questions are:
> 
> 1) Is lldb ready for prime time?

Doesn’t matter.

> 2) What effect does this have on kgdb?  Note, /sys/conf/NOTES contains

Unfortunately, kgdb isn’t available as a port, so that does matter. It is one thing arguing against this change.

> #makeoptions	DEBUG=-g		#Build kernel with gdb(1) debug symbols
> 
> Should this be updates to DEBUG=-gdwarf-2?

Nope. It should stay exactly as it is. We convert -g to -gdwarf-2 for those compilers that need it.

> PS: You'll need to sweep src/ for references to gdb(1).

No. It is just not built by default, not being kicked out of the tree.

Warner