Sorry for the delayed response.
Since it's been more than a couple weeks, I'd guess you've probably
already found the information you need. I'm responding, just in case
you haven't found the info.
Although I'm not sure I have enough details on what you need, to really
be helpful, so I'll just try to give an overview of what I'm aware.
I get the software for my region, the State of Illinois, in the
United States, by visiting
http://www.gnu.org/ then clicking on
Downloads from the menu bar below the main title on the main
page. From the page that link brings up, I find the link labeled
"
Download it from the web or via FTP" and click on it.
On the new page I go through the mirrors for Illinois,
grab the first one that's "
http", I happen to find it
convenient and fairly reliable to download through the browser
I'm using.
That link is
http://mirror.team-cymru.org/gnu/
I mention the specific link, because, although in an ideal World,
the mirrors would have identical content, in real life, the content
of mirrors can vary. If your results don't match mine, one
possible cause of the problem could be if we downloaded from
different places.
I use the browser's facility to search for text within a page, to quickly
find
gdb within that page, click on
gdb, pop down to the bottom of the
page that link brings up, where I find files of different formats, containing
the newest "official" release.
I happen to like
bzip2, so I download
gdb-7.3a.tar.bz2, which contains
AFAIK, the latest official release.
You could at this point try to check the "
Sig" of the file, but that
raises a whole collection of issues regarding so called "Security".
Whether or not security can be bypassed, and whether or not anyone who
did, who knew what they were doing, would make the .
sig file be
consistent with the tar file, even if they were both faked. Then
too, after all it, it is source, and you could always check the code
to see if it made sense, or compare it against source downloaded from
other mirrors, etc. Naturally if the checksums of what's supposed
to be the same file from two servers, match, you need compare no
further.
I place the
tar into a directory I've created to build
gdb and
get the files out of the
tar, making a log of that procedure
like so:
tar xjvf gdb-7.3a.tar.bz2 > gdb-7.3a.untar.log 2>&1
I check the log for errors. There are none. I change to the
build directory created by un-tar-ing the files.
cd *3
Glancing at the main
README file there, gives me info on how to build
gdb.
From that, for safety sake, I build
gdb with these commands which
seem appropriate, since I'm using the bash shell:
CC=gcc ./configure
Since I saw no errors I continue with:
CC=gcc make
Again, there are no errors. I'm pleased because some earlier releases
needed to be modified to build without errors.
From the build directory, there is a path
gdb/gdbserver in which
the
gdbserver executable is built. There is a
man page for
gdbserver
there. In my Linux environment, if I don't wish to install the files
I've built,
I can directly view the
man page like this:
man -l gdb/gdbserver/gdbserver.1
and the full
.info file for
gdb, including information on
remote
debugging, can be viewed with this command:
info -f gdb/doc/gdb.info
You have the URL for one of the main documents on
gdb internals:
http://sourceware.org/gdb/current/onlinedocs/gdbint/
There are various documents about
gdb on the Web, tutorials,
mentions of the protocol that is used between the local and remote
programs for
remote debugging, etc. But all taken together, I
don't know that they really give you any more meaningful information
than you can find in the documents that have already been
specifically mentioned.
I'm not aware of any document readily available on the Web that's
just about the design of
gdbserver. Of course the Web is very large
and a design document may still be out there somewhere.
As far as searching for a document specifically on the design of
gdbserver, I've been developing software and dealing with
Internetworking concepts, both for dozens of years, since the days
when what we had was called USENET, which essentially grew into
what was known by billions of people as the Internet, and more
recently the Web. I've tried dozens of Search Engines. Although, AFAIK
Wolfram Alpha is purported to use some sophisticated algorithm, I've
tested other engines against the version of
Wolfram that was live when
I tested, and my feeling is that
Startpage and
Bing tend to produce the
best results.
But with differences in the way various engines acquire and index data,
it can be worthwhile trying different engines and different keywords.
I've used a variety of engines and keywords to search for a design
document specifically on
gdbserver, since your questions got me
interested in it, and I haven't found such a document. But you may
have better luck.
Without a specific
gdbserver design document, depending on what
exactly you're trying to accomplish, you might be able to proceed
by looking at the source code that is *specific* to
gdbserver in the
gdb/gdbserver directory.
If it would be more helpful to start with something of a model, and
you are familiar with UML, several UML tools that can be pointed at
source code and will "Reverse Engineer"/generate a UML model from the
existing source code, are listed here:
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikiped...Language_tools
Although Web searches find other free UML tools which can generate UML
models from source code, I've always thought the
Wiki page was nice,
because it lists several tools in one place, especially multiple
Open Source tools.
Finally, I could be confused, but my recollection was that
gdbserver
was effectively almost a general purpose
"stub" for
remote debugging,
rather than requiring people to create their own
stubs specific to a
particular purpose. So focusing on information about how to design a
stub might be relevant to understanding the design of
gdbserver.
