Re: External Program interaction with Insight

[Keith Seitz <keiths@redhat.com>]

On Fri, 22 Feb 2002, Duane Ellis wrote:

>
> 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"

Ouch! You had to bring thaqt up! (Yes, I wrote that POS...)

> 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.

Even easier: write yourself a plugin to do it. I will be checking in a
slightly revised plugin build architecture to deal with building plugins
on multiple host platforms.

> 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.

Close enough. ;-) I'll be committing some changes to the memory window
interface which passes the memroy window's table into the C code and
filling it there. Gets us a good performance boost.

> 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.

I hope you're using a safe tcl interpreter to do this, interfacing this
interpreter to insight's. It would be a little risky to allow direct
access to Insight's interp. I would love to see an interface class for
this specific purpose. (Hint, hint ;-)

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

Yeah. TCP/IP? WHat's that. We now use HTTP for everything. NFS? Bwaa haa
haa haa. Try WebDAV instead. Pretty soon we'll all have tcp ICMP!

Keith