Perry E. Metzger wrote:
> Elad Efrat <elad@NetBSD.org> writes:
>   
>> Chris Gilbert wrote:
>>     
>>> Log Message:
>>> Remove arm support for IPKDB.
>>>
>>> It hasn't worked since arm was broken out from arm32 in Jan 2001, and
>>> no-one has noticed or cared to fix it.
>>>       
>> Can someone confirm IPKDB is working for other platforms?
>>     
>
> One problem is, if I recall correctly, that you need to have a special
> ethernet device driver to make it work.
>
> Many new x86 machines no longer have serial ports at all, so IPKDB or
> similar mechanisms would seem to be quite important. It would seem
> smarter to fix than to dump. Of course, this isn't an issue if one has
> no interest in running a kernel debugger -- Linux has avoided ever
> having one...
>
> Perry
>   

Reading the man pages it seems it requires an NE2000 on a PCI bus, as it 
drives the NIC directly rather than through standard drivers.  I did 
find a reference to a non-existant file that implies that it's possible 
to make it work with other NICs be providing a driver.

I'm not saying it wouldn't be useful to have, but it probably needs a 
rethink.  I suspect most people use ddb over a serial port for debugging.

The fact that for arm it's been broken for 7 years and no-ones noticed 
means it's an unused feature for arm, and having it clutter up the code 
seems a bad thing.

gdb doesn't appear to have support for ipkdb any more.  On gdb from 
NetBSD 3.0/i386 doesn't have ipkdb listed as a target.  A quick rummage 
on cvsweb shows that ipkdb support disappeared when we removed gdb 5.0:
http://cvsweb.netbsd.org/bsdweb.cgi/src/gnu/usr.bin/gdb/Attic/remote-ipkdb.c?hideattic=0
I guess it was never ported to newer gdbs, so I'd say that no-one's 
using ipkdb on any version of NetBSD since 2.0

Thanks,
Chris