Re: Can't debug multithreaded apps on mips-sgi-irix-6.5

[David Anderson]

Richard Tollerton <address@hidden> writes:
>Environment: SGI Octane (MIPS R10K 64-bit mode) running IRIX 6.5; gcc
>3.0.4 with gcc 2.95.3 tested previously. SGI development tools include the
>MIPSPro 7.3 toolchain. gdb version is 5.1.1 with 5.0 used previously.
>
>Description: Any multithreaded app cannot be debugged with gdb; it hangs
>on application startup. I've tested this with my code (~7000-line Qt C++
>app), somebody else's GLUT app, and this one-liner test case that doesn't 
>even use threads:

Unfortunately, gdb does not yet support IRIX pthreads.
Even if gdb did not hang the  result would not be useful.

There is a special shared library, libspypt.so, to interact
with IRIX pthreads and we've not documented the interface 
nor shipped the headers.  Oops.
It's unfortunately not like any existing pthreads interface.
Partly because IRIX pthreads are all *within* one process
as of IRIX6.5 -- very different than say Linux.
ptrace is useless for this and /proc required considerable
extension.

The problem is we just did not get around to shipping or documenting
anything on this (libspypt.so is shipped, but
not the headers needed to compile code to interact
with libspypt.so). 
This is  not 'secret'.
We've provided the headers (and some documentation) to
some people, but that does not yet directly help gdb.

Yes, I'm somewhat embarrassed by this, but
I have not had time to be any help.

Anyone wishing to volunteer on this will need help
from us and should contact me.

Sorry. At this time your only choices are
a) try ddd or some other gui that 'hides' the dbx-ness
   of dbx on IRIX
   (to the extent such do, I _still_ have not tried ddd)
b) use dbx or Workshop on IRIX.

Again, sorry. Not what you wanted to hear.
address@hidden