Insight/gdb on MinGW/MSYS (Windows XP)?

Insight/gdb on MinGW/MSYS (Windows XP)?

[Toralf Lund]

Has anyone here got Insight working properly on a MinGW/MSYS setup under 
Windows XP? Or even a plain gdb?  I'm trying to debug applications built 
by a gcc version set up for target mingw32, using a binary version 
downloaded from the MinGW project web, but it doesn't work very well. 
Actually, I can do *some* work, but

    * The debugger crashes in all sorts of unpredictable ways.
    * ... and some predictable ones, too. For instance, I suspect that
      "step into" always leads to a crash.
    * It seems like I can pretty much forget about doing *any* kind of
      debugging of DLLs.
    * When something critical occurs, so that the debugger stops in the
      SIGSEGV handler or similar, it won't know where it came from most
      of the time; the stack window will just show lots of question
      marks, and there is no way to figure out where exactly the code
      crashed.
    * The same thing happens if I stop in something like a Glib error
      handler.


- Toralf

Re: Insight/gdb on MinGW/MSYS (Windows XP)?

[Duncan Murdoch]

On 11/14/2006 11:45 AM, Toralf Lund wrote:
> Has anyone here got Insight working properly on a MinGW/MSYS setup under 
> Windows XP? Or even a plain gdb?  I'm trying to debug applications built 
> by a gcc version set up for target mingw32, using a binary version 
> downloaded from the MinGW project web, but it doesn't work very well. 
> Actually, I can do *some* work, but

I use the Cygwin gdb and insight binaries, and they're fine.  You need 
to watch out for pathnames (e.g. in your .gdbinit file); they need to be 
specified in Cygwin format, not Windows format.

The shell doesn't really matter (Insight is fine in a Windows CMD 
shell), but it might cause less cognitive dissonance ;-) if you use a 
Cygwin shell as well, rather than MSYS.

This works pretty well for MinGW binaries.  Currently we use -gdwarf-2, 
we used to use -g, for debug information.

Duncan Murdoch

> 
>     * The debugger crashes in all sorts of unpredictable ways.
>     * ... and some predictable ones, too. For instance, I suspect that
>       "step into" always leads to a crash.
>     * It seems like I can pretty much forget about doing *any* kind of
>       debugging of DLLs.
>     * When something critical occurs, so that the debugger stops in the
>       SIGSEGV handler or similar, it won't know where it came from most
>       of the time; the stack window will just show lots of question
>       marks, and there is no way to figure out where exactly the code
>       crashed.
>     * The same thing happens if I stop in something like a Glib error
>       handler.
> 
> 
> - Toralf

Re: Insight/gdb on MinGW/MSYS (Windows XP)?

[Toralf Lund]

Duncan Murdoch wrote:
> On 11/14/2006 11:45 AM, Toralf Lund wrote:
>> Has anyone here got Insight working properly on a MinGW/MSYS setup 
>> under Windows XP? Or even a plain gdb?  I'm trying to debug 
>> applications built by a gcc version set up for target mingw32, using 
>> a binary version downloaded from the MinGW project web, but it 
>> doesn't work very well. Actually, I can do *some* work, but
>
> I use the Cygwin gdb and insight binaries, and they're fine.  You need 
> to watch out for pathnames (e.g. in your .gdbinit file); they need to 
> be specified in Cygwin format, not Windows format.
>
> The shell doesn't really matter (Insight is fine in a Windows CMD 
> shell), but it might cause less cognitive dissonance ;-) if you use a 
> Cygwin shell as well, rather than MSYS.
>
> This works pretty well for MinGW binaries.  Currently we use 
> -gdwarf-2, we used to use -g, for debug information.
Right. Why didn't I think of that? I've now installed a "minimal" Cygwin 
setup consisting only of the gdb package and the base components (via 
the networked installer), and tested the debuggers a bit. And, yes, it 
does look like they are somewhat more reliable than the MinGW builds - 
although I have managed to crash this version of Insight, too. I'm not 
able to run Insight properly from the CMD shell, though; when I start 
it, *something* seems to happen, but the windows never show up...

Thanks,

- Toralf

RE: Insight/gdb on MinGW/MSYS (Windows XP)?

[Dave Korn]

On 17 November 2006 14:50, Toralf Lund wrote:


> the networked installer), and tested the debuggers a bit. And, yes, it
> does look like they are somewhat more reliable than the MinGW builds -
> although I have managed to crash this version of Insight, too. I'm not
> able to run Insight properly from the CMD shell, though; when I start
> it, *something* seems to happen, but the windows never show up...

  It might be interesting to try strace'ing insight when launched from each
kind of shell, logging the strace output to files, and diff'ing them
afterwards.

    cheers,
      DaveK
-- 
Can't think of a witty .sigline today....