Debugging on Amiga OS4

Hi, I am just curious on getting the latest information wrt. debugging for developers on AmigaOS4.

So far, my understanding is the GDB is not available, and that the closest thing we have is Spotless, which is not fully developed.

Is this the case? Or, am I missing something.

A lot of great work is going on, but having a debugger is really important.

Regs,
rjd.

@rjd324

Second.

Not much help from me, but watching this space

Then, I am just another person here asking for stuff instead of "doing" stuff. Sure, I have ported a few things over, but I think having a debugger is an absolutely fundamental tool.

What do we need to do to make this happen?

I remember Trevor talking about GDB some years ago. I recall Richard Stallman talking about the bare-bones essentials for the future or software for an OS/System: a compiler, a debugger are pretty much the top of the list.

We have great people doing great things, but the debugger - for whatever reason - seems to be not getting the dedication it deserves. How can I, or @raziel, or the number of other programmers help? I am not claiming to be useful btw, I just would be happy to help in the development of what is a fundamental tool.

I bring this up because I am trying to help on the clib2 pthreads branch. Debugging it would hugely useful.

Although I am quite used to printf debugging, even at work, when it comes to multiple interoperable tasks, this is where a debugger is more useful.

For a single threaded application it is easier to do printf debugging.

For now, gdb seems to work on some of the older machines, but not on X5000. I believe it works fine on X1000.

This influences all the development teams, and I'd love to see work on that, too.

There is a remote gdbserver for 68k machines from bebbo at https://github.com/bebbo/bgdbserver which I haven't tried yet. Something like that could be helpful as well.

@Walkero
GDB is working on X5000, just on beta-kernel, not on public one.

But, that need to be noted : GDB on amigaos4 crash, bugs, porn and crap :) It can do some very simple things, but once you start to use it for real, it just died on simple stuff => no use.

@rjd324

Currently the only one which can be at least half usable is "db101". Spotless probably too, but "db101" was very well tested, have even some tasty features in, etc. Spotless while should be by idea be better and nicer, still suffer from some random issues which Alfkil didn't fixed at the moment, so.. kind of nothing.

Year ago, i tried to do that : i created on freelance sites a real jobs vacansion, for 1-2 thousand payment per month, to find out developers who can port for real GDB on amigaos4 (for that, i provided them with fully setuped emulator (winuae) with classic os4.1, and all basic stuff). So, few were about to start, then most of them was out of expirience, and one guy (who also do commit some fixes to GDB repo) , was about to do something, were starting, and realize that he can't do so. So everything is fucked up.


For me, the bigger issue with debugger, that once we start to doing so , we meet the wall called "something working wrong in kernel in terms of interrupts", or "debug interface have a bug", or something of that sort which mean fixes in kernel => unpossible to wait years.

As result we have no debuggers. I for myself was in hope for remote GDB debugger , etc, was even tried to do something myself at start : https://github.com/kas1e/gdb

Then billifish was about to help, and them also disappear without fixing some necessary stuff for.

So, it's all mixture of non-skilled devs willing to spend time on and proper adaptation/fixes of kernel (which may never happens). No one want to work on something, which will requere a bug-fix in kernel, which he need to wait year or two for if ever.

But i assume if one will start to work on proper GDB port, he may be success in some form. Just there need lot of skill in low-level coding and amiga-internals in general too.

So,

Does this mean that db101, until a newer publicly released kernel, is the canonical debugger to use?

Does it suffer from any bugs? Can it handle applications using threads, where those threads, under the hood, are just separate tasks?

@walkero

GDB is useless on X1000.

I only use the king of debuging "printf"

@rjd324
db101 is just at least "working", but far from being cool and perfect. So just try it out, maybe it will cover your needs (but i doub, and you will end up with prinfs debugging anyway, IMHO).