Re: Trouble with gdb 6.8 on Irix

[Dimitrios Apostolou <jimis at gmx dot net>]

On Mon, 2008-07-07 at 09:51 -0700, Joel Brobecker wrote:
> Dimitris,
> 
> > I should also note that gdb 6.8 doesn't work as it should on my
> > platform. I am trying to debug firefox, but gdb just hangs while loading
> > the binary. Top shows 100% CPU usage for firefox, 0% for gdb, and it
> > stays like that for long. I had better results with gdb 6.3, where gdb
> > managed to work but was unable to provide a proper backtrace when the
> > crash happened. 
> 
> I think that GDB on mips-irix has been in dire need of attention.
> It's something I have on my list and I hope to get to it by the end
> of the year, but my hopes often get overridden by more urgent issues...
> The release that AdaCore uses in its product is GDB 5.3 (very old now,
> I know).

It's a pity. Please don't deprecate gcc or gdb on Irix. SGI are very
closed-architecture machines and Irix is the only OS that takes
advantage of their full potential. I would be glad to help in any way,
even if I didn't understand a thing of the fixproto stuff you were
talking about.

> 
> > remote.c: In function `extended_remote_attach_1':
> > remote.c:2859: warning: unsigned int format, pid_t arg (arg 3)
> > gmake[2]: *** [remote.o] Error 1
> > gmake[2]: Leaving directory `/tmp/gdb-6.8/gdb'
> > 
> > But on my system the following is true for pid_t:
> >           typedef  long            pid_t;
> 
> I didn't see this problem when I tried to build on this platform.
> But I was using the CVS HEAD, so either this is already fixed there,
> or we're using different compiler versions (mine is based on 4.1).

I guess it's the compiler that makes the difference then:
gcc (GCC) 3.4.6

But I can't think of a way to get it fixed in a portable way, since it's
the only platform that has pid_t as long.

> 
> > Finally a minor issue is that gdb needs gmake to compile. It's not a
> > bug, but I thought that since autotools are being used, the Makefiles
> > would be portable to all makes. However the native make of Irix aborts
> > with a syntax error. Please tell me if you care on this, so that I'll
> > send you more details. 
> 
> Please send in the details. There was some talk about adding GNU make
> as a requirement to build GDB, but this may not happen.

Here is the error:
config.status: creating gdb.threads/Makefile
config.status: creating gdb.trace/Makefile
config.status: creating gdb.xml/Makefile
make: file `Makefile' line 296: Syntax error
*** Error code 1 (bu21)
*** Error code 1 (bu21)
*** Error code 1 (bu21)


And line 296, of the root Makefile:

   290  MAKEINFOFLAGS = --split-size=5000000
   291
   292  # ---------------------------------------------
   293  # Programs producing files for the HOST machine
   294  # ---------------------------------------------
   295
   296  AS = as
   297  AR = ar
   298  AR_FLAGS = rc
   299  CC = gcc
   300  CXX = g++


Dimitris