First Infinity full-system preview now available

[Gary Benson <gbenson@redhat.com>]

Over the past few weeks I've been working on a full-system preview
release of Infinity.  It's now available:

  https://infinitynotes.org/wiki/First_Flight

This release comprises just enough of Infinity for GDB to attach to a
live process or start with a core file.  "info threads" should work,
"print errno" does not.

The page linked above details how to:

 * Build glibc with Infinity notes for thread debugging
 * Run applications using that glibc.
 * Use unmodified GDB to debug those applications using Infinity.

All this can be done as a normal user (root access is not required).

This release should allow you to see what Infinity notes look like in
the field.  The notes in this release add 880 bytes to libpthread.so
on x86_64.  This is probably about half of what GDB needs to replicate
what it needs from libthread_db, so I expect the final overhead to be
about 1.7k (some of which will be in the runtime linker).  Please note
that Infinity notes are NOT mapped into memory.

This preview uses a libthread_db shim that calls into the Infinity
client library libi8x.  This shim exists for the purposes of this
preview release only: there are NO current plans to make this shim
suitable for production use: clients that wish to access libpthread
internals via a libthread_db-style interface can continue to use the
libthread_db.so provided by glibc.

Please direct questions to infinity@sourceware.org.

Thanks!
Gary

-- 
https://infinitynotes.org/