gdb and gdbserver compatability

[ColinB <cbyh at yahoo dot com>]

We are currently using gdb and gdbserver for remote debugging on a
LynxOS platform. The gdb/gdbsever source has been modified by Lynx so
that it will compile on LynxOS.

The target machine (running gdbserver) has an older version of LynxOS
than the local machine (running gdb), but we were able to compile the
gdb source from the local machine on the older remote machine, so we
currently have the same version of gdb and gdbserver (4.16-97r1)
running on both systems.

However we now need to run a more recent version of LynxOS on the local
machine but have found that that there are so many changes to LynxOS
that we can not compile the corresponding version of gdb/gdbserver
(4.17-gnupro-98r2) source code on the old target machine. We could get
Lynx involved to modify their gdb source code so that it would build on
the older target, but this may not be necessary if it was possible to
have a 4.17 gdb working correctly with a 4.16 gdbserver.

What I am trying to ascertain is if there are any significant changes
between gdb versions 4.16 and 4.17 which could affect this
cross-version working. If the gdb/gdbserver communication protocol has
not changed between these two versions then this may work OK, but there
may be a lot of more subtle changes which will prevent it or cause
obscure problems.

Can anyone comment on whether this cross-version approach is likely to
be OK?

Obviously we'd still have to check with Lynx re their
platform-depandant changes to gdb, but at least if we could get some
idea whether the *generic* version of gdb would work this way then that
would be a start.

Thanks,

Colin Browell


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