Re: [patch] IPv6 support for gdbserver

[Daniel Jacobowitz <drow at false dot org>]

On Wed, Sep 27, 2006 at 06:33:37PM +0200, Jan Kratochvil wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> while it may not make too much sense here is IPv6 support ("tcp6:"/"udp6:"
> address prefixes, autodetected if possible) for
> target-remote/gdbserver/gdbreplay.

Hi Jan,

One trend I've noticed in a lot of your patches is that they're very
focused on the environment you're working in (Red Hat Linux).  It's
very important that when you modify the FSF GDB, you consider all the
places where it is used and the different possible environments. As a
specific example, I suspect that this would break GDB builds on a
number of targets - getaddrinfo is not sufficiently widely available
to use without testing for it, and I don't know if it requires
additional libraries.  It's usually better to be safe than sorry
with these things.  Maybe another list reader knows better than I do
what we would need to do to use this support portably.

Do you think the GDB support is useful enough to merge?  I don't have a
feeling either way; I don't use IPv6, but I realize more and more
people do, so this might be a good (and NEWS-worthy) feature.

The gdbserver/gdbreplay support I am more skeptical about.  You've
added lots of address parsing code to what is supposed to be a very
minimal program.  But today gdbserver always binds to any available
interface, so there must be a simpler way to check for any INET6
interfaces similarly (assuming the current code won't).

Maybe we should add stdin/stdout support to gdbserver and make an
external utility handle any more fancy networking scenarios.  I'm
thinking of "socat" here.  What do you think of that idea?  We've done
stdin/stdout for other stubs in the past and it's quite handy. Or if
you want to leave inferior stdout alone you can use two specified file
descriptors.

-- 
Daniel Jacobowitz
CodeSourcery