[Qemu-devel] Re: About QEMU debugging console

[Jan Kiszka <jan.kiszka@siemens.com>]

Am 26.10.2010 14:22, Zhiyuan Shao wrote:
> Hi team,
> 
> I am a Qemu User, and using Qemu 0.13.0 to debugging the linux kernel
> code (Qemu+GDB). 
> 
> During the usage, I found the Qemu debugging console (i.e., entered by
> pressing Ctl+Alt+2 in Qemu SDL window or by passing "-monitor stdio" to
> Qemu in the command line) is rather difficult to use. 

Regarding usability in this scenario: You know that there is QEMU
monitor pass-through via gdb "monitor" command?

> It can not show
> some important information, e.g., on i386 platform, which is my major
> interest, it can not show IDT, GDT information. Regarding the page
> mapping information, "info tlb" actually do a really bad job. 
> 
> On this side, I think Bochs is good. Unfortunately, it seems do not
> support gdb-stub debugging and general purpose debugging at the same
> time.
> 
> I do not know if the Qemu team had made any plans to improve this? such
> as embedding the bochs debugging alike functionalities in future Qemu
> releases?

The most important lacking feature is proper system-level debugging
support for gdb (via gdbstub). Once gdb has full access to all CPU
states of the x86 targets, you can pretty-print whatever you want inside
gdb via some nice Python scripts etc.

Jan

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