Hardware Watchpoint/Breakpoints and Remote Protocol

[Steven Johnson <sjohnson at neurizon dot net>]

The support for Hardware Watchpoints and Breakpoints in the remote 
protocol is currently unusable.  The code is all there (mostly) but it 
can never be activated because it is forced to think all targets have no 
resources to support these.  Currently there is no way to make the 
remote protocol think anything other.

Attached is a patch that creates two commands from GDB to allow the 
number of Hardware Watchpoints and Breakpoints supported by a remote 
target to be set to something other than zero.  Doing this makes them 
work good.

Ideally, the target would be interogated to find out what it supports, 
but that is a bigger harder patch and would require much greater work 
than this simple fix. (Arguably for little real gain).

Its also not very accurate, because sometimes hardware allows (for 
example) different numbers of watchpoints, depending on the type of 
watchpoints that have been set. (The MPC8XX watchpoint unit for example).

Comments welcome, it works excellent for me using Motorola MPC862 
Hardware watchpoint support, and a BDM interface communicating to GDB 
with the remote protocol over TCPIP.

The patch was made against a version of GDB just prior to V5.3, but it 
applies to V5.3 fine.

Regards,
Steven

Attachment: patch-enable-hw-remote-features
Description: application/java-vm