DSDP/DD/Face-to-face Alameda 14-18-May-2007

The purpose of this meeting is to continue work on the DSF/GDBmi reference implementation staffed by Ericsson. This meeting will be very technical in nature and will focus on coding rather than presentations. The meeting is open to all, but please see the prerequisites below.

Date

Monday May 14 2007 to Friday May 18 2007

Hotel

Marina Village Inn
1151 Pacific Marina
Alameda, CA 94501
Water Front Room with Queen or King at special rate of 99$. The room has to be booked by phone and you need to specify you are visiting Wind River. This hotel is a short walk from the Alameda campus.
+1 800 345-0304 or +1 510 523-9450
Hotel Link Map

Location

Wind River Corporate Headquarters
500 Wind River Way
Alameda, CA, 94501
Map

Prerequisites

• Installed on laptop Linux SUSE Enterprise Server 9 or 10
• Install Java 5, Eclipse 3.3 M5, CDT 4.0(head from CVS), DSF 0.9(head from CVS), GDB 6.6 all on Linux
• Read all DSF documentation
• Make the connection work between DSF and GDB
• Attend the phone conference on March 22 to ensure the above steps where successfully done
• Understand the DSF API (reading the code)
• Attend the phone conference on May 3 to ensure the above steps where successfully done

A Windows configuration could be use on non-Linux laptop:

• Java 5, Eclipse 3.3 M5, CDT 4.0(head from CVS), DSF 0.9(head from CVS), MinGW GDB 5.2.1 (could also try with 6.3.2) all on Windows

Agenda

• DSF architecture knowledge transfer
• Knowledge transfer of the GDB/MI implementation and short discussion about incompatibilities between DSF and the functionality provided by GDB
• Create a project plan
• Coding by Ericsson of some functionality (e.g. one MI cmd)
• Short discussion on DSF improvements to support embedded system profiling

Attendees

• Doug Gaff, Wind River
• Pawel Piech, Wind River
• Randy Rohrbach, Wind River
• Ted Williams, Wind River
• Alf Larsson, Ericsson (CPP)
• Veenu Verma, Ericsson (TSP)
• Francois Chouinard, Ericsson (TSP)
• Erik Ridderby, Ericsson (BMTP)
• Dominique Toupin, Ericsson (R&D PM&T)
• Conor White, Ericsson (R&D PM&T)

Other names will be added as we get confirmation.

Documentation to help get familiar with Eclipse Debugging and DSF

Unfortunately there is a long and steep learning curve when starting to develop debuggers for Eclipse. On the upside there is a lot of excellent documentation to help with this task. I recommend looking at these materials in the order listed below.

http://www.eclipse.org/articles/Article-Launch-Framework/launch.html

Article describing the Eclipse launch framework and a walk-through example of how to use it. Launch framework is a rather un-usual feature of Eclipse debugger, which causes some confusion to a lot of new Eclipse users and developers. Understanding the launch framework is essential in making sense of the overall debugger framework.

http://www.eclipse.org/articles/Article-Debugger/how-to.html

This article walks through creating a simple debugger with basic features using the "standard" eclipse debug model. Although the provisional "flexible hierarchy" interfaces introduced in Eclipse 3.2 make it possible to by-pass the standard model and this is what DSF does, understanding the standard debug model is still essential for backward compatibility and interoperability with third party tools.

http://www.eclipsecon.org/2007/index.php?page=sub/&id=3701

Presentation from a tutorial on Eclipse debugging from EclipseCon 2007. It contains a presentation with a very broad overview (214 slides) of debugger features, as well as a few examples on general debugger features, memory view, and flexible hierarchy. This tutorial is a lot to digest at one time, but it's also a very valuable resource in learning to use the debug framework.

http://dsdp.eclipse.org/help/latest/index.jsp?topic=/org.eclipse.dd.dsf.doc/docs/dsf_white_paper.html

DSF online documentation. The documents under this link are somewhat out of date with respect to specific package and class names, but in principle they are very relevant.

• White Paper - Paper describing goals technology goals and principles
• Services Model - Design document describing the framework for declaring and using services in DSF.
• Concurrency Model - Design document describing the threading model of DSF
• Data Model - Design document describing the data model to be used with DSF. This document is least complete of the design document, but it does touch on some of the important topics. It is best to study the flexible hierarchy framework and examples before looking at the DSF Data Model.
• GDB/MI Implementation Setup Guide - A brief list of steps to install and run DSF GDB/MI implementation.

http://www.eclipse.org/downloads/download.php?file=/dsdp/dd/2007-1-9_Toronto_DSF_ViewModel.ppt

Presentation further describing the DSF Data/View model. This presentation was given at the last DD meeting in Toronto on January 10th, 2007. It gives an overview of the DSF integration with flexible hierarchy framework.

http://dev.eclipse.org/viewcvs/index.cgi/org.eclipse.dd.dsf/plugins/org.eclipse.dd.dsf.examples/?root=DSDP_Project

Examples of use of DSF framework features. Studying these examples is the easiest way to get started on understanding and using DSF.