Messages in this thread | | | Date | Sat, 05 Feb 2005 17:00:56 +0100 | From | Otto Wyss <> | Subject | Why is debugging under Linux such a pain |
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Sorry if this is off topic here but IMO this _has_ to be discussed in a broader audience since it probably has a rather large impact about the acceptance of Linux even if it isn't the kernel's fault.
I just build the minimal sample of the wxWidgets framework and it crashed when playing around with the menu. Well crashing might happen so I took out GDB and tried to discover the reason. But when the sample crashed I couldn't switch to the terminal where GDB was running. No mouse or keyboard input was possible. I was completely stuck, IMO something _never_ should happen. Who's to blame for this situation: wxWidgets, GDB, GCC/G++, X or the Linux kernel? Or any combination?
Luckally I wasn't completely stuck since I started X with 'startx' and could kill X with ctrl-alt-backspace. Also ctrl-alt-f1 worked so I could switch to the console. At least I could shutdown my computer. Anyway the above situation should not happen.
Back to debugging with GDB, I knew it's possible to to debug from the console (which worked normal) but I wasn't sure how the assign could be done. Of course 'man gdb' didn't show how, worse it didn't give any hints where to look further. At this point I got upset and lost interest and instead trying to produce a fix I simply made a bug report.
There are more issues with GDB which don't belong here but make debugging under Linux just painful. I'm willing to spend a lot of my spare time for a free system usable by anyone but when I have to do debugging the fun is over and fast loose interests.
Does anyone has an idea how debugging under Linux can be improved to an acceptable state?
O. Wyss
-- Development of frame buffer drivers: http://linux-fbdev.sf.net Sample code snippets for wxWidgets: http://wxcode.sf.net How to build well-designed applications: http://wxguide.sf.net Desktop with a consistent look and feel: http://wyodesktop.sf.net - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
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