Re: [PATCH 0/3] gdbstub: add support for switchable endianness

[Philippe Mathieu-Daudé]

On 8/23/21 5:30 PM, Peter Maydell wrote:
> On Mon, 23 Aug 2021 at 16:21, Philippe Mathieu-Daudé <philmd@redhat.com> 
> wrote:
>>
>> On 8/23/21 4:20 PM, Changbin Du wrote:
>>> To resolve the issue to debug switchable targets, this serias introduces
>>> basic infrastructure for gdbstub and enable support for ARM and RISC-V
>>> targets.
>>>
>>> For example, now there is no problem to debug an big-enadian aarch64 target
>>> on x86 host.
>>>
>>>   $ qemu-system-aarch64 -gdb tcp::1234,endianness=big ...
>>
>> I don't understand why you need all that.
>> Maybe you aren't using gdb-multiarch?
>>
>> You can install it or start it via QEMU Debian Docker image:
>>
>> $ docker run -it --rm -v /tmp:/tmp -u $UID --network=host \
>>   registry.gitlab.com/qemu-project/qemu/qemu/debian10 \
>>   gdb-multiarch -q \
>>     --ex 'set architecture aarch64' \
>>     --ex 'set endian big'
>> The target architecture is assumed to be aarch64
>> The target is assumed to be big endian
>> (gdb) target remote 172.17.0.1:1234
> 
> I don't think that will help, because an AArch64 CPU (at least
> in the boards we model) will always start up in little-endian,
> and our gdbstub will always transfer register data etc in
> little-endian order, because gdb cannot cope with a target that
> isn't always the same endianness. Fixing this requires gdb
> changes to be more capable of handling dynamic target changes
> (this would also help with eg debugging across 32<->64 bit switches);
> as I understand it that gdb work would be pretty significant,
> and at least for aarch64 pretty much nobody cares about
> big-endian, so nobody's got round to doing it yet.
> 
> Our target/ppc/gdbstub.c code takes a different tack: it
> always sends register data in the same order the CPU is
> currently in, which has a different set of cases when it
> goes wrong.

I remember having tested the 'setend be' instruction (from
https://github.com/pcrost/arm-be-test) 3 years ago using
it. Connected as little endian, set breakpoint, on BP hit
disconnect, set big-endian, reconnect, keep single-stepping
(in the same gdb session).

I doubt anything changed since.