GDB Tracepoints, Redux

Tracepoints in the GNU Debugger (GDB) are an advanced feature that collects data from the program without stopping it, thus enabling GDB to help debug time-critical code. CodeSourcery has been developing GDB support for a high-performance telecom application. The application runs under Linux, but the usage model includes diagnosis of systems in the field, so we have built a debugging stub that links into the app and controls it from a dedicated thread. In addition to regular debugging (both all-stop and non-stop), this stub supports tracing.

On the GDB side, tracepoints are being made into a type of breakpoint, and the remote protocol dependency is being eliminated by moving tracing operations into GDB's target vector. In addition to reducing old idiosyncrasies, these changes enable new features that are also being added, such as conditional tracepoints, and reading of trace data from a file.

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