Re: NEED FEEDBACK: time to start the GDB 8.2 release process (2018-05-30 update)

[Alan Hayward <Alan dot Hayward at arm dot com>]

> On 30 May 2018, at 23:53, Joel Brobecker <brobecker@adacore.com> wrote:
> 
> Hey everyone,
> 
> Although 8.1.1 is not entirely out yet, I think we should start working
> on GDB 8.2 now, rather than wait more. Looking at the NEWS files,
> we have a reasonable list of new features to warrant a new release.
> 
> The initial plan, published at https://www.sourceware.org/gdb/schedule/,
> called for a branch on Jun 15th, so 2 weeks from now. In internet time,
> this is quite a short time-frame, but perhaps we'll be able to make it?
> 
> Does anyone have projects that are nearly finished and would be
> important to include in 8.2 rather than wait for 8.3? If yes,
> what kind of time frame can we expect for getting those in.
> Should we wait for the patch to be in master before we cut the branch,
> or can the changes be backported afterwards?


I’d very much like to get SVE support into 8.2.
What that entails is:
1) Enable for gdb: https://sourceware.org/ml/gdb-patches/2018-05/msg00755.html
2) Enable for gdbserver
3) Small fix to un-break core files on see
4) Add dwarf registers

2 and 3 are fairly short and should probably be rolled into a V2 of 1.
4 is trivial.

Hopefully all recache and target description changes over the past year
means all the contentious parts of the sve patches have been solved.

This would give full register dumps on aarch64 sve programs.
However, core dumps will be missing sve registers and any program
that changes vector length on the fly will cause an error (this
is expected to be very rare in the wild). The plan is to fix both
of those for 8.3

Alan.