Re: External Program interaction with Insight

[Duane Ellis <duane_ellis@franklin.com>]

david> Is it possible to have an external programme interact with
       Insight so as to use GDB to retrieve information about
       registers and memory locations which can then be outputed to a
       file or to the external ?

Yes, and no. Look specifically at the file "v850ice.c" in that case,
GDB uses a programitic interface to the file "necmsg.dll"

You could also look at the "win32-nat.c" file which makes use of an
another 'dll' but in a different way.

The centeral problem is that of push, or pull, or interactive.

push: gdb gives information to the other process

pull: the other process calls back into GDB to obtain
      other information or to do othe things.

interactive: Both

In the above you also have to deal with "thread issues" GDB is a
single thread of execution.

Probably the easier - and slicker way is to use Tcl/Tk's built in
socket stuff. What I'm suggesting is you setup a small 'server'
application that responds to connections. 

Look specifically at the tcl/tk socket stuff. You might actually
be able to do all of this in tcl/tk, maybe 100 to 200 lines of
tcl/tk code.

Remember: GDB has added some commands to tk so that you can send
arbitrary commands to GDB and capture their output. ie: capture the
output and send it back to your 'remote control program'

this is how for example the memory dump window gets it's data to
display. It just 'captures' the output of various commands an parses
them.

In my simulator I used Tcl/Tk's tcp/ip socket interface to simulate a
serial port. When things come in from the remote socket, the 'appear'
as interrupts from the serial port, you read from the 'rx-data'
register and you pull bytes out.

Likewise, when the code under simulation writes to the tx-data port
the Tcl/Tk stuff writes back to the socket.

Look at the tcl/tk command 

     socket -server PROC PORTNUMBER

If you want to go really far, you could make the thing look like a
mini-web server and control gdb from your browser. Probably though a
simple set of commands is all you need.

Just imagine - tunnel through a fire wall with http(s) to debug a
problem on a remote machine... what is this world comming to.

-Duane.