Re: rpctrace improvement for the Google Summer of Code

[olafBuddenhagen]

Hi,

On Tue, Mar 20, 2007 at 11:16:13PM +0100, Richard Braun wrote:

> Here is a proposal for a Google Summer of Code project : rpctrace is
> one of the most useful debugging tools on the Hurd. It could help a
> lot in understanding some of the bugs of the system. Unfortunately, it
> can hardly be used to debug some essential translators because it
> cannot be used to trace already running tasks. I don't know exactly
> how this could be done, so I'm asking : is this technically feasible
> as a GSoC project ?

Actually, I already thought of something like this, though I would
suggest making it a more generic task: Improving Hurd-specific debugging
tools.

Implementing the possibility of attaching rpctrace to running processes,
is one possible thing that could be done. But there are many others,
like adding ability to rpctrace to show the names of the parameters
(needs rpctrace and mig changes); adding some tool(s) that allow logging
the interactions between several processes, to help understanding
complex problems and/or doing system profiling; interactive RPC
debugging tools (possibly as GDB extension); and so on.

However, I didn't propose this so far, as tschwinge seems to have a
perfectly opposite opinion than me on what are suitable tasks and what
aren't.

-antrik-