Multi-process and multi-target

Multi-process and multi-target

[Paul_Koning]

Gentlepeople,

Multiprocess support looks like a nice way to debug multiple copies of a distributed application, provided the copies can be made to run on a single target system.  The user interface of multiprocess support is a bit clunky and it takes a fair amount of experimentation to figure out how things really work, but I could get it to work.

However, it is often the case that such a test setup involves multiple machines.  The multiprocess machinery seems to be perfectly capable of dealing with such a mix, even if the machines are not all the same architecture.  But there’s only one target.

I wonder about generalizing the target machinery to allow multiple targets to be active simultaneously, with a particular target associated with a set of inferiors.  Does this make sense?  Is there a better way?  Is someone already doing this?  If not, would such a project be welcomed?

	paul

Re: Multi-process and multi-target

[Pedro Alves]

On 07/10/2015 09:33 PM, Paul_Koning@Dell.com wrote:
> Gentlepeople,
> 
> Multiprocess support looks like a nice way to debug multiple copies of a distributed application, provided the copies can be made to run on a single target system.  The user interface of multiprocess support is a bit clunky and it takes a fair amount of experimentation to figure out how things really work, but I could get it to work.
> 
> However, it is often the case that such a test setup involves multiple machines.  The multiprocess machinery seems to be perfectly capable of dealing with such a mix, even if the machines are not all the same architecture.  But there’s only one target.
> 
> I wonder about generalizing the target machinery to allow multiple targets to be active simultaneously, with a particular target associated with a set of inferiors.  Does this make sense?  Is there a better way?  Is someone already doing this?  If not, would such a project be welcomed?
> 

It would be very much welcome.

Tromey was working on that last year before he moved on to work on
other neat things at Mozilla.  The project's page is here:

  https://sourceware.org/gdb/wiki/MultiTarget

(As result of lessons from that work, the target_ops stack delegation
mechanism was redone/simplified/harmonized on master, and the branch
predates all that, I believe.)

Thanks,
Pedro Alves