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Corey Minyard authored
Add a debugging interface for PowerPC that allows signal handlers (or any jump to a context, really) to perform debug functions. It allows the a user program to turn on single-stepping, for instance, and the thread will get a trap after executing the next instruction. It can also (on supported PPC processors) turn on branch tracing and get a trap after the next branch instruction is executed. This is useful for in-application debugging. Note that you can enable single-stepping on x86 processors directly from signal handlers. Newer x86 processors have the equivalent of a branch-trace bit in the IA32_DEBUGCTL MSR and could have similar function to this syscall. Most other processors could benefit from a similar interface, except for ARM which is extraordinarily broken for debugging. Future uses of this could be adding the ability to set the hardware breakpoint registers from a signal handler. Signed-off-by: Corey Minyard <minyard@mvista.com> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
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