great news about reverse debugging

Posted Oct 8, 2009 13:47 UTC (Thu) by coriordan (guest, #7544)
Parent article: GDB 7.0 released

The reverse-debugging feature was on FSF's high priority list for a good while - which usually indicates there's some acute problem of free software users/developers being drawn to some non-free software by this feature.

Glad to hear it's gotten done.

http://www.fsf.org/campaigns/priority.html

great news about reverse debugging

Posted Oct 8, 2009 22:32 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (4 responses)

I dunno. Do non-free debuggers implement reverse debugging? It's obviously
really killingly *useful* to developers, which is probably why it got
done :) (it also needs lots of storage, which is probably why it didn't
get done twenty years ago.)

great news about reverse debugging

Posted Oct 8, 2009 23:32 UTC (Thu) by MichaelSnyder (guest, #61265) [Link] (3 responses)

VMware workstation 7.0 supports reverse debugging in both gdb (for Linux VMs) and Virtual Studio (for M$oft VMs).

great news about reverse debugging

Posted Oct 9, 2009 8:43 UTC (Fri) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (2 responses)

A reversible VM isn't *quite* the same thing. (There was a reversible VM project for Linux based on UML, called ReVirt, but it was an academic project so it suffered the usual fate of such and died as soon as the funding went away. I keep wishing someone would bring one back again, but, admittedly, without ever actually doing anything toward that end myself.)

great news about reverse debugging

Posted Oct 9, 2009 18:35 UTC (Fri) by MichaelSnyder (guest, #61265) [Link] (1 responses)

No, but VMware supports reverse *debugging*, with gdb.
You run gdb on the host, and debug the guest (either user
process or kernel). When you say "reverse-continue" in gdb,
VMware executes the guest backward until it hits a breakpoint
or watchpoint.

great news about reverse debugging

Posted Oct 9, 2009 22:46 UTC (Fri) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

i.e., a reversible VM (with the reversibility interface being GDB,
definitely a good decision.)

great news about reverse debugging

Posted Oct 8, 2009 22:36 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

ooo! it can use chronicle-written databases! Yay!

(think 'persistent after-the-fact remote debugging')