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Re: CVS commit: src/sys/arch



Perry E. Metzger wrote:
Elad Efrat <elad%NetBSD.org@localhost> 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



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