Re: [GSoC] Remote kernel debugging over Ethernet

[Manuel Bouyer <bouyer%antioche.eu.org@localhost>]

On Fri, Mar 27, 2009 at 03:38:11PM +0200, Jordan Gordeev wrote:
> I believe people want it.
> However, I'm still looking for an answer to the question about the  
> implementation approach.
> What should a student do, if he wants to work over the summer towards a  
> goal of producing a functional remote over-Ethernet kernel debugger?  
> Write special ipkdb drivers for all the NIC's he has in his posession?
> I, personally, have no experience in writing device drivers, and I find  
> fighting with hardware bugs and engineering braindamage not particularly  
> attractive.

I think the best options would be to try reusing existing drivers in
a modified if_ethersubr.c environnement. All of them should in fact support
polling if you call the interrupt routine until you have a packet in the
input queue, or the output queue is empty.

The modified environnement should provide what if_ethersubr.c and if_media.c
provides, and modified versions of bus_space(9), bus_dma(9) and probably
pci_intr(9). I think pci(9) can be reused as is in the modified
bus_space(9)/bus_dma(9) environnement.

-- 
Manuel Bouyer, LIP6, Universite Paris VI.           
Manuel.Bouyer%lip6.fr@localhost
     NetBSD: 26 ans d'experience feront toujours la difference
--