RPCEmu as debugger

I wonder as there are no real good debugger for RISC OS if the technology behind RPCemu (or QEMU) wouldn’t be good to create a good debugger for RISC OS on Windows/Linux.

There was talk on Stardot – I think – on using a RO emulator for that purpose – I don’t know how far it got.

The questionn is what the programmers of RPCEmu think about it how easy it will be.
As an emulator it should go through each line of the ARM assembler code anyhow.
So basically only an interface must be added to step though each line, Show register content and set Break points and conditional break points.

Other question is : Are there any arguments not to use RPCEmu or Qemu as base for a debugger?

I wonder as there are no real good debugger for RISC OS if the technology behind RPCemu (or QEMU) wouldn’t be good to create a good debugger for RISC OS on Windows/Linux.

What do you mean with a “good debugger”?

If you need a Source Debugger for the Operating System itself you can use QEMU, which already has a GDB Server and can connect to a GDB client on which you pre-map the sources. This is how I debug Linux kernel and Linux modules for example.

If instead you need a Source Debugger for your applications (I think your developers made like 2 applications on RISC OS a chat and a pseudo-filer), if you are using GCC (which I recall you’ve mentioned), then you could compile the GDBServer which is provided with GCCSDK (which I think it’s what you’re using for your 2 apps) and then map the sources on a GDB client running on Linux (or Mac x86) and debug your code remotely. I have put on the list of video tutorials to make a mini series on how to do remote debugging on RISC OS.

Finally, on some PCB you could also use JTAG, but again this is to debug RISC OS itself, not your applications.

Adding debugging features to RPCEmu could certainly be useful, but it would also be extremely limited. Remember, RPCEmu (as the name implies) emulate an OLD RiscPC (at best), so you’ll be limited in which scenarios you can tests. My recommendation is to learn how to use GDBServer for the apps, especially for the ELF format, so you can debug directly from an HW platform that is giving you troubles.

Just my 0.2c

@Paolo
Thanks for the info. Yes you are right we are so far using GCC for !ChatCube and !CLfiler.