GUI Debugger

Nicholas Miell nmiell at comcast.net
Thu Jul 28 00:32:43 UTC 2005


On Wed, 2005-07-27 at 13:40 -0700, Kenneth Porter wrote:

> BTW, while discussing debuggers, do any of the high-end x86 family include 
> the branch trace features commonly found in embedded processors?

Yes. P6-era and Opteron/Athlon 64 processors have LastBranchToIP /
LastBranchFromIP and LastExceptionToIP / LastExceptionFromIP MSRs that
can be enabled at runtime. Pentium 4 and Pentium M derived processors
can record the same data for the last four brances in to MSRs, and they
also have a much more complicated system where you can record all
branches to a buffer and get interrupts when that buffer would overflow,
etc.

Of course, Linux (and Linux debuggers) are still in the stone age and
don't support any of this. Somebody really needs to take ptrace() and
gdb out back and shoot them.

-- 
Nicholas Miell <nmiell at comcast.net>




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