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From: jkp@cs.HUT.FI (Jyrki Kuoppala)
Newsgroups: comp.os.minix
Subject: Re: Most requested features in MINIX...
Message-ID: <1991Feb14.001348.16342@santra.uucp>
Date: 14 Feb 91 00:13:48 GMT
References: <43516@nigel.ee.udel.edu> <1991Feb3.233633.7986@cunixf.cc.columbia.edu> <1991Feb11.155205.18570@chvax.uucp>
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Reply-To: jkp@cs.HUT.FI (Jyrki Kuoppala)
Organization: Helsinki University of Technology, Finland
Lines: 25
In-Reply-To: wssaz@chvax.uucp (Schweizer W.)

In article <1991Feb11.155205.18570@chvax.uucp>, wssaz@chvax (Schweizer W.) writes:
>As MINIX is intendes for educational purposes I also think is needs a
>debugger. I work on ST-MINIX and there IS a debugger (mdb), but only
>on assembler level. I vote for a SYMBOLIC debugger, which would make
>life easier for software porters.

Well, I have gdb 3.5 running on pc532 (ns 32532 machine) Minix 1.3 -
and no, it isn't very useful because there's no ptrace(2) and I
haven't even modified it to read Minix core files yet.  But it can
read symbols from a.out files well enough, and do disassembly etc.
When I modify it reading core files it should be somewhat useful.

I use gcc, gas and GNU binutils which use the BSD/GNU dbx format for
symbols, so there was really very little to change.  The real work is
of course implementing the ptrace or similar system call.

Has someone implemented ptrace or another system call providing enough
functionality for a debugger to use stepping etc. ?

This won't help people who use the PH Minix distribution as is, of
course (I remember hearing that GNU software will not be with Minix),
but for those who can grab the stuff off the net or get software from
other distributors than PH can have a debugger.

//Jyrki