Re: [PATCH v3 00/17] Catch syscall group

[Sergio Durigan Junior <sergiodj at redhat dot com>]

On Tuesday, April 28 2015, Pedro Alves wrote:

> I was wondering if we couldn't share most of the grouping
> per-architecture, e.g., by having each arch syscall file xi:include a
> base Linux default groups file, that listed the grouping without
> the syscall number.  E.g., create a linux-defaults.xml like:
>
>  <syscall-defaults name="select" groups="descriptor"/>
>  ...
>  <syscall-defaults name="openat" groups="descriptor,file"/>
>
> And then the arch-specific syscall files would do:
>
>  <xi:include href="linux-defaults.xml"/>
>  ...
>  <syscall name="select" number="82"/>
>  ...
>  <syscall name="arch_specific_foo" number="200" groups="descriptor"/>
>  ...
>
> And then we teach gdb about syscall-default-groups, or
> we could even instead preprocess the architecture xml to expand
> the groups into each syscall with xsltproc (we already use
> this tool, see gdb/features/Makefile and gdb/features/number-regs.xsl).

Thanks for the review, Pedro.  I think this is a nice idea, but I would
like to propose that we accept the patches as-is, without this
improvement, and then work on it later.  First, it's been a long time
since we're discussing this feature, and I don't want Krisman to not
feel encouraged to continue contributing :-).  Also, I think the syscall
XML generation really needs a revamp, independently of how/if we use
groups or not.  There should be possible, for example, to easily update
the XML's with the latest Linux kernel source.  This task is on my
plate, though it's a low priority.  So, for now, I think Krisman's work
is good enough.

In sum: I propose we go ahead now ("don't let the perfect be the enemy
of the good"), and concentrate on the XML problem later.

Cheers,

-- 
Sergio
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