Retiring in-tree GDB

[Warner Losh]

> On Oct 20, 2015, at 2:36 PM, John Baldwin <jhb at freebsd.org> wrote:
> There are some issues still with devel/gdb: namely it does not currently
> support some of the platforms supported by our in tree gdb such as arm and
> mips.  For these platforms I think the in-tree gdb will need to remain until
> there is a suitable alternative.

What’s the lift for adding mips and arm support? Can we leverage what we
have done for gcc/binutils ports at all and/or what we have in the tree today?

> However, I would like to propose that we retire the in-tree GDB for some of
> our platforms (namely x86) for 11.  In particular, I think we should default
> to enabling lldb and disabling gdb for platforms that meet the following
> criteria:
> 
> 1) devel/gdb works including thread and kgdb support
> 2) lldb works
> 
> We could perhaps be more aggressive and handle lldb and gdb toggles
> independently, but I think we want to ship some sort of userland debugger
> out of the box on all of our platforms.  The question I think might be if
> we end up with platforms where 1) is true but 2) is not (such as powerpc).
> 
> I believe that these conditions are only true for x86 currently.
> 
> Comments?

I think you are making this way too complicated.

I think we should just turn gdb off for all platforms. Leave it off by default.
For arm it’s an OK debugger, but not great. For mips it is barely usable
in its current state. So there’s not a huge loss in doing this.

For platforms where lldb works, turn it on.

Have devel/gdb available for as many platforms as it works on.

Warner

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