Update NEWS, remove refs to UDI and Energize/Cadillac from ChangeLog.

This commit is contained in:
Stu Grossman 1992-10-23 08:49:17 +00:00
parent 79d47bd097
commit 5f5be54ce8

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gdb/NEWS
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*** Changes in GDB-4.7:
auto demangling style
improved dwarf support?
redundant SO fix...
hppa cross host
better c++ support?
apollo 68b host
remote.c improved (new T message)
improved 29k support
host/native/target split
bugs bugs bugs
sparc-stub.c
rs6000 cleanups... cross host
* New native hosts
==>Sun Aug 30 21:32:17 1992 Ian Lance Taylor (ian@cygnus.com)
some 386 support
* New cross target hosts
HP/Apollo 68k (under the BSD domain)
* New cross targets
Fujitsu SparcLite - This is a Sparc without floating-point intended for
imbedded applications.
* G++/C++ support
As always, G++ support keeps on impoving. We now deal with Cfront style
name mangling, and can even extract type info from mangled symbols.
Calling of virtual functions and inferior methods has been improved as well.
GDB can now automatically figure out which symbol mangling style your C++
compiler uses.
* Major bug fixes
The crash that was occuring when debugging Sun Ansi-C compiled binaries has
been fixed. This was due mishandling of the extra SO stabs that the
compiler was outputting.
We also finally got Ultrix 4.2 up and running in house, and were able to
really fix core file support!
It was discovered that the reason that single-stepping was so slow on all
of the Mips based platforms (primarily SGI and DEC) was that we were trying
to demangle and lookup a symbol used for internal purposes on every instruction
that was being stepped through. Changing the name of that symbol so that it
couldn't be mistaken for a C++ mangled symbol sped things up a great deal.
We also sped up symbol lookups in general by getting much smarter about
when symbol mangling was necessary.
* 29k support
A bunch of work has been done to improve the general 29k support. In
particular, a new user controllable variable 'call_scratch_address' can be
used to specify the location of a scratch area to be used when GDB needs to
call a function in the target. This was necessary because the usual method
of putting the scratch area on the stack was not feasible for systems that
have seperate instruction and data spaces.
We also did a bunch of work on the 29k UDI (Universal Debugger Interface)
code, but at the last minute we discovered that we didn't have all of the
appropriate copyright paperwork, and had to yank it all out. We are working
with AMD to resolve this, and hope to have it available soon.
* Remote stuff
We have made some improvements in the remote serial line protocol which should
speed up things a great deal (especially for targets with lots of registers).
The remote code now supports a new `expedited status' ('T') message which
replaces the old 'S' status message. This message has a much more flexible
format which allows the remote stub to send an arbitrary set of registers
whenever the stub takes control. This greatly speeds up stepping, as the
stub can supply only the registers GDB requires during this process. It
eliminates the need to fetch the entire register set for each instruction being
stepped through.
GDB was also made a bit smarter about reading registers from the target. It
now makes much more use of the cache. In effect, it now implements a
write-through cache, and only reads the registers when if the target has run.
There is also a new remote stub for Sparc processors. You can find it in
gdb-4.7/gdb/sparc-stub.c. This was written to support the SparcLite product,
but actually contains no SparcLite specific code. It should run on any
stand-alone Sparc processor with a serial port that can be dedicated to GDB
for remote debugging.
* Host/native/target split
GDB has had some major internal surgery recently in order to untangle some
of the mess related to supporting hosts and remote targets. Now, when you
configure GDB for a remote target, it may no longer load in all of the host
support for debugging local programs. This means that if you make a GDB to
debug a remote vxWorks target from a Sun4 host, you will no longer get
ptrace() or Sun4 core file support. This surgery was necessary to ensure
that arbitrary host/target combinations were possible. In particular, it
makes it much more practical to build new configurations for remote targets
that in the past were only hosts.
The primary concept behind the detanglement was to seperate the code into
one of three categories. The host category is for code that is host
specific, and can only be compiled for a particular host configuration.
The target category is for code which is target specific, but can be
compiled on any host. The native category is for the situation where the
host and target are the same system (this usually means that you are going
to debug an inferior process).
* General
There is a new opcodes library which will contain all of the disassembly
routines, and opcode tables at some point in the future. At present, it
only contains Sparc and Z8000 routines. This was done in order to get the
assembler and the debugger to share these routines.
The file gdb-4.7/gdb/doc/stabs.texinfo is a (relatively) complete reference
to the stabs symbol info used by the debugger. It is (as far as we know)
the only published document on this fascinating topic.
There are now pre-command hooks that are used to attach arbitrary commands
to any command. The commands in the hook will be executed prior to the
users command. You can creat a hook which will be executed whenever the
program stops.
BFD now supports the Zilog Z8000 microprocessor.
And, of course, many bugs have been fixed.
*** Changes in GDB-4.6: