Hi, I've been experimenting with using strace via gdbserver, through the gdb remote protocol. It's now in good enough state that I'd like to get some feedback.
First, syscall support in gdbserver is very new. There was a patch posted a few years ago by Philippe Waroquiers, but I only just finished getting that merged last week. This will be in GDB 7.11: https://sourceware.org/git/?p=binutils-gdb.git;a=commit;h=82075af2c14b1f8a54fa5796fb63f7ef23f98d9d You can find my strace hacking at github.com/cuviper/strace/. It adds a "-G host:port" option to point to a listening gdbserver. However I've mostly just tested this on localhost so far, and surely cross-arch stuff won't work. I'm not necessarily looking for a code review though, as I definitely took some prototyping shortcuts and this is not in merge-able state. Even the branch point from strace master is pretty old now -- I'm now working on rebasing that. As RFCs go, I'm more looking for feedback on the concept. Why would one want this? At a first glance, I hope even just "remote strace" is interesting. That isn't just over TCP as implemented now, but eventually any way that gdbserver can be reached, like serial debugging as it was originally started. GDBserver is smaller than the strace binary too, so you could add just gdbserver on your remote hosts, containers, etc. to support both gdb and strace. My colleague Stan Cox is also working on letting gdbserver work with multiple clients, even allowing them to independently attach to the same process. So you can basically use this like a ptrace multiplexer, letting you use strace and gdb on the same process! https://sourceware.org/git/?p=archer.git;a=shortlog;h=refs/heads/scox/globalstate He also has a dyninst branch, which means you could strace a process that's also being instrumented at the same time. https://sourceware.org/git/?p=archer.git;a=shortlog;h=refs/heads/scox/dyninst All feedback is welcome. If you think this might be interesting enough to properly merge into strace, I'd especially appreciate guidance on how to best approach that. Thanks! Josh ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Site24x7 APM Insight: Get Deep Visibility into Application Performance APM + Mobile APM + RUM: Monitor 3 App instances at just $35/Month Monitor end-to-end web transactions and take corrective actions now Troubleshoot faster and improve end-user experience. Signup Now! http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=267308311&iu=/4140 _______________________________________________ Strace-devel mailing list Strace-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/strace-devel
