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PTP/designs/sdm
Overview
The scalable debug manager (SDM) is the component of the PTP parallel debugger that implements the debugger operations for a particular architecture, and is primarily responsible for managing communication between the Eclipse and the application being debugged. It is an implementation of the PDI in the Debug Platform.
The SDM comprises three parts:
- a client component (Eclipse plugin) that implements the PDI and provides conversion between the abstract interface and a wire protocol
- a tree-based communications network that manages communication between the client and an arbitrary number of debug servers
- a backend debug engine that controls an application process using low-level debug actions
Debug Client
The debug client component is responsible for interfacing between the PTP debugger (in Eclipse) and the remote SDM components. It comprises the following plugins:
- org.eclipse.ptp.debug.sdm.core
- org.eclipse.ptp.debug.sdm.ui
In addition, the org.eclipse.ptp.proxy.protocol package provides a range of utility classes and methods for managing the debugger wire protocol.
The first (core) package provides an implementation of the PDI to translate between internal commands/events and the proxy wire protocol. When the debugger first starts, it calls a method in the proxy package that binds to a TCP/IP port number and waits for an incoming connection. When the connection is established, the PDI implementation command methods call methods in the proxy package to convert these to messages that will be transmitted across the socket connection. Incoming messages are in turn dispatched to the appropriate PDI event methods.
The second (UI) package, provides various user interface components that are required by Eclipse, including the SDM preference page and the dynamic component of the Debugger launch configuration tab.
Debug Communications Network
The SDM employes a tree-based communications network in order to manage scalable communication between the front-end (Eclipse) and the processes being debugged. The tree is comprised of a master process and a number of server processes. The master process is the connection point for the debugger front-end.