Debugging X.org drivers?

[Kendall Bennett]

Adam Jackson <ajax at nwnk.net> wrote:
	
> On Friday 29 October 2004 20:57, Jim Gettys wrote:
> > X11R6.8 has the ability to load .so files as well as the XFree86 loader,
> > and therefore is able to be debugged using a standard GDB.
> >
> > I don't know the exact details; IIRC Adam Jackson (ajax) did the work...
> >     - Jim
> 
> Yep, that was me.  Feel free to drop me a line if you have any
> trouble making dlloader modules work. 

Will do, thanks! I am glad this will be working. How hard would it be to 
get it working in say 4.3.0 as well? We have some work we need to do in 
4.3.0, and although we usually back port from R6.8.1, if we get bugs in 
4.3.0 or other versions we are still stuck trying to debug them.

Although we have also been working at getting the Open Watcom debugger to 
debug GCC generated binaries. I think that is about 95% complete right 
now, and when it is done I may end up using that debugger instead of GDB. 
It will run in a console with text windowing and everything! Plus I am 
pretty sure it will be easy to teach it how to debug X modules, since we 
taught it how to understand SNAP modules very easily.

Plus GDB command line sucks, and I still can't find a decent GUI front 
end for it.

> Kendall, I'm for some reason thinking that the SciTech drivers
> were based on the cfb framebuffer core.  cfb will not work under
> dlloader with 6.8 without a patch: 
> 
> http://freedesktop.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=1114
> 
> but you may be better off switching to fb.  ISTR some correctness
> issues with cfb that no one wants to look at because cfb is
> terrifying. 

I am pretty sure we are not using cfb, but the regular fb. Our drivers 
are just regular XAA drivers right now. We actually have a complete 
replacement for fb that is SciTech SNAP specific, but that code is not 
complete yet. It provides a layer that is better for SNAP (some XAA stuff 
does not map very well to the SNAP API's), plus it uses our buffer 
manager which means we can share video memory with all other SNAP code 
that needs to access offscreen video memory.

Regards,

---
Kendall Bennett
Chief Executive Officer
SciTech Software, Inc.
Phone: (530) 894 8400
http://www.scitechsoft.com

~ SciTech SNAP - The future of device driver technology! ~