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authorStan Shebs <shebs@codesourcery.com>1999-04-16 01:35:26 +0000
committerStan Shebs <shebs@codesourcery.com>1999-04-16 01:35:26 +0000
commitc906108c21474dfb4ed285bcc0ac6fe02cd400cc (patch)
treea0015aa5cedc19ccbab307251353a41722a3ae13 /gdb/TODO
parentcd946cff9ede3f30935803403f06f6ed30cad136 (diff)
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Initial creation of sourceware repositorygdb-4_18-branchpoint
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+If you find inaccuracies in this list, please send mail to
+bug-gdb@prep.ai.mit.edu. If you would like to work on any of these,
+you should consider sending mail to the same address, to find out
+whether anyone else is working on it.
+
+General To Do List
+------------------
+
+This list is probably not up to date, and opinions vary about the
+importance or even desirability of some of the items.
+
+Add an "info bfd" command that displays supported object formats,
+similarly to objdump -i.
+
+START_INFERIOR_TRAPS_EXPECTED need never be defined to 2, since that
+is its default value. Clean this up.
+
+It should be possible to use symbols from shared libraries before we know
+exactly where the libraries will be loaded. E.g. "b perror" before running
+the program. This could maybe be done as an extension of the "breakpoint
+re-evaluation" after new symbols are loaded.
+
+Make single_step() insert and remove breakpoints in one operation.
+
+Speed up single stepping by avoiding extraneous ptrace calls.
+
+Speed up single stepping by not inserting and removing breakpoints
+each time the inferior starts and stops.
+
+Breakpoints should not be inserted and deleted all the time. Only the
+one(s) there should be removed when we have to step over one. Support
+breakpoints that don't have to be removed to step over them.
+
+Update gdbint.texinfo to include doc on the directory structure and
+the various tricks of building gdb.
+
+Do a tutorial in gdb.texinfo on how to do simple things in gdb.
+E.g. how to set a breakpoint that just prints something and continues.
+How to break on aborts. Etc.
+
+Provide "voodoo" debugging of core files. This creates a zombie
+process as a child of the debugger, and loads it up with the data,
+stack, and regs of the core file. This allows you to call functions
+in the executable, to manipulate the data in the core file.
+
+GDB reopens the source file on every line, as you "next" through it.
+
+Referencing the vtbl member of a struct doesn't work. It prints OK
+if you print the struct, but it gets 0 if you try to deref it.
+
+Persistent command history: A feature where you could save off a list
+of the commands you did, so you can edit it into something that will bring
+the target to the same place every time you source it.
+This would also be useful for automated fast watchpointing; if you go
+past the place where it watchpoints, you just start it over again and
+do it more carefully.
+
+Deal with the SunOS 4.0 and 4.1.1 ptrace bug that loses the registers if
+the stack is paged out.
+
+Finish the C++ exception handling stub routines. Lint points them out
+as unused statics functions.
+
+Perhaps "i source" should take an argument like that of "list".
+
+See if core-aout.c's fetch_core_registers can be used on more machines.
+E.g. MIPS (mips-xdep.c).
+
+unpack_double() does not handle IEEE float on the target unless the host
+is also IEEE. Death on a vax.
+
+Set up interface between GDB and INFO so that you can hop into interactive
+INFO and back out again. When running under Emacs, should use Emacs
+info, else fork the info program. Installation of GDB should install
+its texinfo files into the info tree automagically, including the readline
+texinfo files.
+
+"help address" ought to find the "help set print address" entry.
+
+Remove the VTBL internal guts from printouts of C++ structs, unless
+vtblprint is set.
+
+Remove "at 0xnnnn" from the "b foo" response, if `print address off' and if
+it matches the source line indicated.
+
+The prompt at end of screen should accept space as well as CR.
+
+Check STORE_RETURN_VALUE on all architectures. Check near it in tm-sparc.h
+for other bogosities.
+
+Check for storage leaks in GDB, I'm sure there are a lot!
+
+vtblprint of a vtbl should demangle the names it's printing.
+
+Backtrace should point out what the currently selected frame is, in
+its display, perhaps showing "@3 foo (bar, ...)" or ">3 foo (bar,
+...)" rather than "#3 foo (bar, ...)".
+
+"i program" should work for core files, and display more info, like what
+actually caused it to die.
+
+"x/10i" should shorten the long name, if any, on subsequent lines.
+
+Check through the code for FIXME comments and fix them. dbxread.c,
+blockframe.c, and plenty more. (I count 634 as of 940621 - sts)
+
+"next" over a function that longjumps, never stops until next time you happen
+to get to that spot by accident. E.g. "n" over execute_command which has
+an error.
+
+"set zeroprint off", don't bother printing members of structs which
+are entirely zero. Useful for those big structs with few useful
+members.
+
+GDB does four ioctl's for every command, probably switching terminal modes
+to/from inferior or for readline or something.
+
+terminal_ours versus terminal_inferior: cache state. Switch should be a noop
+if the state is the same, too.
+
+ptype $i6 = void??!
+
+Clean up invalid_float handling so gdb doesn't coredump when it tries to
+access a NaN. While this might work on SPARC, other machines are not
+configured right.
+
+"b value_at ; commands ; continue ; end" stops EVERY OTHER TIME!
+Then once you enter a command, it does the command, runs two more
+times, and then stops again! Bizarre... (This behaviour has been
+modified, but it is not yet 100% predictable when e.g. the commands
+call functions in the child, and while there, the child is interrupted
+with a signal, or hits a breakpoint.)
+
+help completion, help history should work.
+
+Check that we can handle stack trace through varargs AND alloca in same
+function, on 29K.
+
+wait_for_inferior loops forever if wait() gives it an error.
+
+"i frame" shows wrong "arglist at" location, doesn't show where the args
+should be found, only their actual values.
+
+There should be a way for "set" commands to validate the new setting
+before it takes effect.
+
+A mess of floating point opcodes are missing from sparc-opcode.h.
+Also, a little program should test the table for bits that are
+overspecified or underspecified. E.g. if the must-be-ones bits
+and the must-be-zeroes bits leave some fields unexamined, and the format
+string leaves them unprinted, then point this out. If multiple
+non-alias patterns match, point this out too. Finally, there should
+be a sparc-optest.s file that tries each pattern out. This file
+should end up coming back the same (modulo transformation comments)
+if fed to "gas" then the .o is fed to gdb for disassembly.
+
+Eliminate all the core_file_command's in all the xdep files.
+Eliminate separate declarations of registers[] everywhere.
+
+"ena d" is ambiguous, why? "ena delete" seems to think it is a command!
+
+Perhaps move the tdep, xdep, and nat files, into the config
+subdirectories. If not, at least straighten out their names so that
+they all start with the machine name.
+
+inferior_status should include stop_print_frame. It won't need to be
+reset in wait_for_inferior after bpstat_stop_status call, then.
+
+i line VAR produces "Line number not known for symbol ``var''.". I
+thought we were stashing that info now!
+
+We should be able to write to random files at hex offsets like adb.
+
+Make "target xxx" command interruptible.
+
+Handle add_file with separate text, data, and bss addresses. Maybe
+handle separate addresses for each segment in the object file?
+
+Handle free_named_symtab to cope with multiply-loaded object files
+in a dynamic linking environment. Should remember the last copy loaded,
+but not get too snowed if it finds references to the older copy.
+
+Generalize and Standardize the RPC interface to a target program,
+improve it beyond the "ptrace" interface, and see if it can become a
+standard for remote debugging. (This is talking about the vxworks
+interface. Seems unlikely to me that there will be "a standard" for
+remote debugging anytime soon --kingdon, 8 Nov 1994).
+
+Remove all references to:
+ text_offset
+ data_offset
+ text_data_start
+ text_end
+ exec_data_offset
+ ...
+now that we have BFD. All remaining are in machine dependent files.
+
+When quitting with a running program, if a core file was previously
+examined, you get "Couldn't read float regs from core file"...if
+indeed it can't. generic_mourn_inferior...
+
+Have remote targets give a warning on a signal argument to
+target_resume. Or better yet, extend the protocols so that it works
+like it does on the Unix-like systems.
+
+Sort help and info output.
+
+Re-organize help categories into things that tend to fit on a screen
+and hang together.
+
+renote-nindy.c handles interrupts poorly; it error()s out of badly
+chosen places, e.g. leaving current_frame zero, which causes core dumps
+on the next command.
+
+Add in commands like ADB's for searching for patterns, etc. We should
+be able to examine and patch raw unsymboled binaries as well in gdb as
+we can in adb. (E.g. increase the timeout in /bin/login without source).
+
+Those xdep files that call register_addr without defining it are
+probably simply broken. When reconfiguring this part of gdb, I could
+only make guesses about how to redo some of those files, and I
+probably guessed wrong, or left them "for later" when I have a
+machine that can attempt to build them.
+
+When doing "step" or "next", if a few lines of source are skipped between
+the previous line and the current one, print those lines, not just the
+last line of a multiline statement.
+
+When searching for C++ superclasses in value_cast in valops.c, we must
+not search the "fields", only the "superclasses". There might be a
+struct with a field name that matches the superclass name. This can
+happen when the struct was defined before the superclass (before the
+name became a typedef).
+
+Handling of "&" address-of operator needs some serious overhaul
+for ANSI C and consistency on arrays and functions.
+ For "float point[15];":
+ptype &point[4] ==> Attempt to take address of non-lvalue.
+ For "char *malloc();":
+ptype malloc ==> "char *()"; should be same as
+ptype &malloc ==> "char *(*)()"
+call printf ("%x\n", malloc) ==> weird value, should be same as
+call printf ("%x\n", &malloc) ==> correct value
+
+Fix dbxread.c symbol reading in the presence of interrupts. It
+currently leaves a cleanup to blow away the entire symbol table when a
+QUIT occurs. (What's wrong with that? -kingdon, 28 Oct 1993).
+
+Mipsread.c reads include files depth-first, because the dependencies
+in the psymtabs are way too inclusive (it seems to me). Figure out what
+really depends on what, to avoid recursing 20 or 30 times while reading
+real symtabs.
+
+value_add() should be subtracting the lower bound of arrays, if known,
+and possibly checking against the upper bound for error reporting.
+
+mipsread.c symbol table allocation and deallocation should be checked.
+My suspicion is that it's full of memory leaks.
+
+SunOS should have a target_lookup_symbol() for common'd things allocated
+by the shared library linker ld.so.
+
+When listing source lines, check for a preceding \n, to verify that
+the file hasn't changed out from under us.
+
+When listing source lines, eat leading whitespace corresponding to the
+line-number prefix we print. This avoids long lines wrapping.
+
+mipsread.c needs to check for old symtabs and psymtabs for the same
+files, the way it happens for dbxread.c and coffread.c, for VxWorks
+incremental symbol table reloading.
+
+Get all the remote systems (where the protocol allows it) to be able to
+stop the remote system when the GDB user types ^C (like remote.c
+does). For ebmon, use ^Ak.
+
+Possible feature: A version of the "disassemble" command which shows
+both source and assembly code ("set symbol-filename on" is a partial
+solution).
+
+investigate "x/s 0" (right now stops early) (I think maybe GDB is
+using a 0 address for bad purposes internally).
+
+Make "info path" and path_command work again (but independent of the
+environment either of gdb or that we'll pass to the inferior).
+
+Make GDB understand the GCC feature for putting octal constants in
+enums. Make it so overflow on an enum constant does not error_type
+the whole type. Allow arbitrarily large enums with type attributes.
+Put all this stuff in the testsuite.
+
+Make TYPE_CODE_ERROR with a non-zero TYPE_LENGTH more useful (print
+the value in hex; process type attributes). Add this to the
+testsuite. This way future compilers can add new types and old
+versions of GDB can do something halfway reasonable.
+
+Clean up formatting of "info registers" on MIPS and 88k. See if it
+is possible to do this generically across all target architectures.
+
+GDB gets bfd/corefile.c and gdb/corefile.c confused (this should be easy to
+repeat even with something more recent than GDB 4.9).
+
+Check that unmatched RBRAC doesn't abort().
+
+Fix mdebugread.c:parse_type to do fundamental types right (see
+rs6000_builtin_type in stabsread.c for what "right" is--the point is
+that the debug format fixes the sizes of these things and it shouldn't
+depend on stuff like TARGET_PTR_BIT and so on. For mdebug, there seem
+to be separate bt* codes for 64 bit and 32 bit things, and GDB should
+be aware of that). Also use a switch statement for clarity and speed.
+
+Investigate adding symbols in target_load--some targets do, some
+don't.
+
+Put dirname in psymtabs and change lookup*symtab to use dirname (so
+/foo/bar.c works whether compiled by cc /foo/bar.c, or cd /foo; cc
+bar.c).
+
+Merge xcoffread.c and coffread.c. Use breakpoint_re_set instead of
+fixup_breakpoints.
+
+Fix byte order and int size sins in tm-a29k.h
+(EXTRACT_RETURN_VALUE). Perhaps should reproduce bug and verify fix
+(or perhaps should just fix it...).
+
+Make a watchpoint on a constant expression an error (or warning
+perhaps)
+
+Make a watchpoint which contains a function call an error (it is
+broken now, making it work is probably not worth the effort).
+
+Re-do calls to signal() in remote.c, and inflow.c (set_sigint_trap and
+so on) to be independent of the debugging target, using target_stop to
+stop the inferior. Probably the part which is now handled by
+interrupt_query in remote.c can be done without any new features in
+the debugging target.
+
+New test case based on weird.exp but in which type numbers are not
+renumbered (thus multiply defining a type). This currently causes an
+infinite loop on "p v_comb".
+
+Nuke baseclass_addr.
+
+Nuke USG define.
+
+"source file more recent" loses on re-read
+
+Fix 386 floating point so that floating point registers are real
+registers (but code can deal at run-time if they are missing, like
+mips and 68k). This would clean up "info float" and related stuff.
+
+Look at Solaris bug in interrupt.exp. Can get out of syscall with
+PRSABORT (syscall will return EINTR) but merely doing that leads to a
+"can't read memory" error.
+
+gcc -g -c enummask.c then gdb enummask.o, then "p v". GDB complains
+about not being able to access memory location 0.
+
+-------------------- enummask.c
+enum mask
+{
+ ANIMAL = 0,
+ VEGETABLE = 1,
+ MINERAL = 2,
+ BASIC_CATEGORY = 3,
+
+ WHITE = 0,
+ BLUE = 4,
+ GREEN = 8,
+ BLACK = 0xc,
+ COLOR = 0xc,
+
+ ALIVE = 0x10,
+
+ LARGE = 0x20
+} v;
+
+If try to modify value in file with "set write off" should give
+appropriate error not "cannot access memory at address 0x65e0".
+
+Why do we allow a target to omit standard register names (NO_STD_REGS
+in tm-z8k.h)? I thought the standard register names were supposed to
+be just that, standard.
+
+Make DEBUG_EXPRESSIONS a maintenance command, dependent on
+MAINTENANCE_COMMANDS.
+
+Allow core file without exec file on RS/6000.
+
+Make sure "shell" with no arguments works right on DOS.
+
+Make gdb.ini (as well as .gdbinit) be checked on all platforms, so
+the same directory can be NFS-mounted on unix or DOS, and work the
+same way.
+
+cd ~/tmp/<M-?> causes infinite loop (where ~/tmp is a directory).
+
+Get SECT_OFF_TEXT stuff out of objfile_relocate (might be needed to
+get RS/6000 to work right, might not be immediately relevant).
+
+Clean up add_toc_to_loadinfo
+
+Think about attached processes and sharing terminal.
+
+John sez in reference to ignoring errors from tcsegpgrp if attach_flag:
+set_tty_state should not have any trouble with attached processes.
+Instead, the tty handling should leave the pgrp of the tty alone when
+attaching to processes (perhaps pass terminal_init_inferior a flag
+saying whether we're attaching).
+
+PAGE_SIZE redefined warnings on AIX. Probably should be using
+BFD_PAGE_SIZE throughout BFD.
+
+Rewrite proceed, wait_for_inferior, and normal_stop to clean them up.
+Suggestions:
+
+ 1) Make each test in wait_for_inferior a seperate subroutine
+ call.
+ 2) Combine wait_for_inferior and normal_stop to clean up
+ communication via global variables.
+ 3) See if you can find some way to clean up the global
+ variables that are used; possibly group them by data flow
+ and information content?
+
+Work out some kind of way to allow running the inferior to be done as
+a sub-execution of, eg. breakpoint command lists. Currently running
+the inferior interupts any command list execution. This would require
+some rewriting of wait_for_inferior & friends, and hence should
+probably be done in concert with the above.
+
+Add function arguments to gdb user defined functions.
+
+Add convenience variables that refer to exec file, symbol file,
+selected frame source file, selected frame function, selected frame
+line number, etc.
+
+Add a "suspend" subcommand of the "continue" command to suspend gdb
+while continuing execution of the subprocess. Useful when you are
+debugging servers and you want to dodge out and initiate a connection
+to a server running under gdb.
+
+Add stab information to allow reasonable debugging of inline functions
+(possibly they should show up on a stack backtrace? With a note
+indicating that they weren't "real"?).
+
+Modify the naked "until" command to step until past the current source
+line, rather than past the current pc value. This is tricky simply
+because the low level routines have no way of specifying a multi-line
+step range, and there is no way of saying "don't print stuff when we
+stop" from above (otherwise could just call step many times).
+
+Modify the handling of symbols grouped through BINCL/EINCL stabs to
+allocate a partial symtab for each BINCL/EINCL grouping. This will
+seriously decrease the size of inter-psymtab dependencies and hence
+lessen the amount that needs to be read in when a new source file is
+accessed.
+
+Do an "x/i $pc" after each stepi or nexti.
+
+Modify all of the disassemblers to use printf_filtered to get correct
+more filtering.
+
+Modify gdb to work correctly with Pascal.
+
+Add a command for searching memory, a la adb. It specifies size,
+mask, value, start address. ADB searches until it finds it or hits
+an error (or is interrupted).
+
+# Local Variables:
+# mode: text
+# End: