Helpful Features in a Debugger

[Maciej W. Rozycki]

On Mon, 22 Feb 2016, Mouse wrote:

> These and many of the other stop conditions could possibly be subsumed
> by a "stop when this expression evaluates true" facility, with
> expression primitives capable of representing all the things you might
> want to watch.  It would of course be CPU-intensive if the expression
> is complicated, but that's unavoidable, and I have occasionally wished
> for "run until this number is greater than that number plus twice this
> register" or the like, even if it runs multiple orders of magnitude
> slower.  (Not when running under RT-11, but that's mostly because I
> have done little-to-no work under RT-11 at all.)

 This is exactly how GDB's watchpoint facility works BTW.  Except from the 
very simple case of watching a memory location, which in some processors 
can be delegated to a hardware watchpoint facility, GDB implements this by 
single-stepping the debuggee repeatedly, which of course hits performance 
enormously.  Then, whether through single-stepping or as a result of a 
hardware watchpoint hit, it stops the debuggee and returns control to the 
user whenever the watchpoint condition evaluates to true.  Any expression 
valid in the high-level language chosen for debugging (which is usually 
the same as one the debuggee has been compiled from) can be used as a 
condition, also for breakpoints, and you can refer to hardware registers, 
which are presented as special variables (side effects work too!).

 As a matter of interest some embedded MIPS processors have more complex 
hardware watchpoint support in which certain conditions can actually be 
presented to hardware as a chain of prerequisites for a watchpoint hit.  
This facility is available for JTAG debugging only and support has never 
been implemented in GDB, although JTAG debugging itself is supported in 
GDB with the use of a suitable remote debug stub (or more precisely GDB 
does not care what it talks to as long as it speaks GDB's language, aka 
Remote Serial Protocol).

 FWIW,

  Maciej