When the underlying debugport transport is reliable, GDB's additional
checksums and acknowledgements are redundant. NoAckMode eliminates the
the acks and allows us to skip checking RX checksums. The GDB packet
framing does not change, so unfortunately (valid) checksums are still
included as message trailers.
The gdb(4) stub in FreeBSD advertises support for the feature in response to
the client's 'qSupported' request IFF the current debugport has the
gdb_dbfeatures flag GDB_DBGP_FEAT_RELIABLE set. Currently, only netgdb(4)
supports this feature.
If the remote GDB client supports the feature and does not have it disabled
via a GDB configuration knob, it may instruct our gdb(4) stub to enter
NoAckMode. Unless and until it issues that command, we must continue to
transmit acks as usual (and for now, we continue to wait until we receive
them as well, even if we know the debugport is on a reliable transport).
In the kernel sources, the sense of the flag representing the state of the
feature is reversed from that of the GDB command. (I.e., it is
'gdb_ackmode', not 'gdb_noackmode.') This is to avoid confusing double-
negative conditions.
For reference, see:
* https://sourceware.org/gdb/onlinedocs/gdb/Packet-Acknowledgment.html
* https://sourceware.org/gdb/onlinedocs/gdb/General-Query-Packets.html#QStartNoAckMode
Reviewed by: jhb, markj (both earlier version)
Differential Revision: https://reviews.freebsd.org/D21761
NetGDB(4) is a component of a system using a panic-time network stack to
remotely debug crashed FreeBSD kernels over the network, instead of
traditional serial interfaces.
There are three pieces in the complete NetGDB system.
First, a dedicated proxy server must be running to accept connections from
both NetGDB and gdb(1), and pass bidirectional traffic between the two
protocols.
Second, the NetGDB client is activated much like ordinary 'gdb' and
similarly to 'netdump' in ddb(4) after a panic. Like other debugnet(4)
clients (netdump(4)), the network interface on the route to the proxy server
must be online and support debugnet(4).
Finally, the remote (k)gdb(1) uses 'target remote <proxy>:<port>' (like any
other TCP remote) to connect to the proxy server.
The NetGDB v1 protocol speaks the literal GDB remote serial protocol, and
uses a 1:1 relationship between GDB packets and sequences of debugnet
packets (fragmented by MTU). There is no encryption utilized to keep
debugging sessions private, so this is only appropriate for local
segments or trusted networks.
Submitted by: John Reimer <john.reimer AT emc.com> (earlier version)
Discussed some with: emaste, markj
Relnotes: sure
Differential Revision: https://reviews.freebsd.org/D21568
We suffer at least one round trip ACK latency every command / packet that
GDB has to send and receive, and the response format for 'info threads'
supports packing many threads IDs into a single packet, so do so.
Adds and uses a new API, gdb_txbuf_has_capacity(), which checks for a
certain number of bytes available in the outgoing txbuf.
On an example amd64 VM, the number of RTTs to transmit this list is reduced
by a factor of 110x. This is especially beneficial with recent GDB, which
seems to request the list at least twice during attach.
correctly for the data contained on each memory page.
There are several components to this change:
* Add a variable to indicate the start of the R/W portion of the
initial memory.
* Stop detecting NX bit support for each AP. Instead, use the value
from the BSP and, if supported, activate the feature on the other
APs just before loading the correct page table. (Functionally, we
already assume that the BSP and all APs had the same support or
lack of support for the NX bit.)
* Set the RW and NX bits correctly for the kernel text, data, and
BSS (subject to some caveats below).
* Ensure DDB can write to memory when necessary (such as to set a
breakpoint).
* Ensure GDB can write to memory when necessary (such as to set a
breakpoint). For this purpose, add new MD functions gdb_begin_write()
and gdb_end_write() which the GDB support code can call before and
after writing to memory.
This change is not comprehensive:
* It doesn't do anything to protect modules.
* It doesn't do anything for kernel memory allocated after the kernel
starts running.
* In order to avoid excessive memory inefficiency, it may let multiple
types of data share a 2M page, and assigns the most permissions
needed for data on that page.
Reviewed by: jhb, kib
Discussed with: emaste
MFC after: 2 weeks
Sponsored by: Netflix
Differential Revision: https://reviews.freebsd.org/D14282
Mainly focus on files that use BSD 2-Clause license, however the tool I
was using misidentified many licenses so this was mostly a manual - error
prone - task.
The Software Package Data Exchange (SPDX) group provides a specification
to make it easier for automated tools to detect and summarize well known
opensource licenses. We are gradually adopting the specification, noting
that the tags are considered only advisory and do not, in any way,
superceed or replace the license texts.
the debugger back-end has changed. This means that switching from ddb
to gdb no longer requires a "step" which can be dangerous on an
already-crashed kernel.
Also add a capability to get from the gdb back-end back to ddb, by
typing ^C in the console window.
While here, simplify kdb_sysctl_available() by using
sbuf_new_for_sysctl(), and use strlcpy() instead of strncpy() since the
strlcpy semantic is desired.
MFC after: 1 month
caches with data caches after writing to memory. This typically
is required to make breakpoints work on ia64 and powerpc. For
those architectures the function is implemented.
backend improves over the old GDB support in the following ways:
o Unified implementation with minimal MD code.
o A simple interface for devices to register themselves as debug
ports, ala consoles.
o Compression by using run-length encoding.
o Implements GDB threading support.
