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Re: gdb handling of Mach exceptions


From: Brent W. Baccala
Subject: Re: gdb handling of Mach exceptions
Date: Fri, 25 Nov 2016 17:15:37 -1000

On Wed, Nov 23, 2016 at 10:03 PM, Brent W. Baccala <cosine@freesoft.org> wrote:

Any comments?
 
Well, yes, actually.  :-)
 
gdb's hurd target has a poorly documented command "set noninvasive".  I don't completely understand it, but...

I'm starting to see the rational for an "invasive" debugging mode.  "Invasive" means that we debug by wrapping Mach ports - the task port needs to be wrapped along with the exception ports.  "Non-invasive" means that we rely on the C library in the program under test to provide some debugging support.  No port wrapping is done.  Breakpoints, for example, work by letting the program's message thread generate a SIGTRAP, which gets relayed to the proc server and is presented to the debugger in response to a wait() call.

Non-invasive is more efficient, but invasive is more reliable.

I'd code it myself, except that we've got the same old problem with detaching a process when its ports are wrapped.  This shows, incidentally, that adding a system call trace facility to the kernel isn't a complete solution.  We don't just want to trace these messages - we want to intercept them and only deliver them after a human being has had the chance to inspect them at a debugger prompt.

    agape
    brent


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