[RFC] HP-UX native support

[RFC] HP-UX native support

[Mark Kettenis]

One of the black pages in GDB's history is what is usually referred to
as the HP merge.  It's what brought us real support for modern HP-UX,
and included nifty features such as follow-fork and such.
Unfortunately the changes didn't fit in very well with the structure
of GDB in those days.  We still suffer from the consequences.

Since then, the HP-UX specific code has seen very little maintenance,
and while I appreciate the efforts of Joel and Randolph to fix things,
I think some more radical changes are needed.

In my tree I have some changes that implement fresh new inf-ptrace.c
based native support for HP-UX 10.20.  It does away with all the nifty
features mentioned above, and leaves us with something more
traditional.  However, I think it'll make maintenance much easier, and
to be honest, I really doubt whether the nifty features still work.

How do people feel about this?

Mark

Re: [RFC] HP-UX native support

[Michael Chastain]

Some scraps of thought:

In general, I'm okay with dropping support for follow-fork and
other hpux-only features.

Most of the PR's for hp-ux are about build problems, rather than
advanced features.  So if building gdb gets better or stays the
same, that's okay.

hpux 10.20 is obsolete and HP no longer supports it.
However, many people still use it.

gdb has to work on hpux 11.00 and hpux 11.11 as well.
I can take care of testing those.

Michael

Re: [RFC] HP-UX native support

[Daniel Jacobowitz]

On Sat, Oct 16, 2004 at 11:04:08AM -0400, Michael Chastain wrote:
> Some scraps of thought:
> 
> In general, I'm okay with dropping support for follow-fork and
> other hpux-only features.

FYI, follow-fork is no longer an HP-UX specific feature.

Mark, I think it's a good idea, but I'm not an HP-UX user, so...
The bit I most want to see die is the SOM and HP-UX debug format
readers, but that's a different problem.

-- 
Daniel Jacobowitz

Re: [RFC] HP-UX native support

[Mark Kettenis]

   Date: Sat, 16 Oct 2004 11:04:08 -0400
   From: Michael Chastain <mec.gnu@mindspring.com>

   Some scraps of thought:

   In general, I'm okay with dropping support for follow-fork and
   other hpux-only features.

It's not unimaginable that I'll re-implement some of these features in
a more general way.  But I shouldn't make any promises about that.

   Most of the PR's for hp-ux are about build problems, rather than
   advanced features.  So if building gdb gets better or stays the
   same, that's okay.

My main motiviation for this is to scrap a lot of ugly
native-dependent code.  This simplification means that building GDB
can only get better.

   hpux 10.20 is obsolete and HP no longer supports it.
   However, many people still use it.

Yup.  At JIVE (www.jive.nl), we're still using 10.20 for "production".
Currently I'm working on our Correlator Control Software that runs on
the machine.

   gdb has to work on hpux 11.00 and hpux 11.11 as well.
   I can take care of testing those.

My current patches don't touch the code for 11.xx at all.  So there's
no real need to test those.  However, I'll probably attack 11.xx after
I'm finished with 10.20.

Mark