Free Software Linux

"This is a request to merge KGDB into the mainline kernel," Jason Wessel announced, posting a series of patches aiming toward that goal. He continued, "as of right now KGDB is comprised of 21 different patches adding in the core api and docs first and then working up to add drivers and arch specific support to KGDB. The patches were broken down into logical pieces for review and comments." He went on to explain:

"The intent of the KGDB patches is to unify the KGDB support across all the architectures that elect to implement the KGDB functionality by providing a common core and an arch specific stub. For quite some time there has been different features and uses of KGDB across the most popular architectures. Having a common core that takes care of protocol parsing and the typical use case of software breakpoints should eliminate the inconsistencies across the archs as well as making it easier to add KGDB support to a new arch."

Andrew Morton, who has been supportive of getting a kernel debugger into the mainline kernel, explained that it was too late in the 2.6.24 review cycle to merge KGDB, meaning it would have to wait for 2.6.25 at the earliest, "this won't work very well. There's a lot of review work to be done here, and a lot of it by busy architecture maintainers. Expecting people to do all this review and test work late in the merge window when they're all madly scrambling to get their bugs^Wpatches into mainline is not reasonable. This should all have started a month ago. So we're looking at a 2.6.25 merge for this work."

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