Date: Thu, 10 Mar 94 17:30:05 JST
From: Stephen Turnbull <turnbull AT shako DOT sk DOT tsukuba DOT ac DOT jp>
To: mcastle AT umr DOT edu
Cc: djgpp AT sun DOT soe DOT clarkson DOT edu
Subject: GDB for GO32 and EMX

I said, among other nonsense:

   > I haven't used EMX, so I don't know much about it.  But GDB requires a
   > multitasking operating system because of the way it's implemented.  So
   > I seem to recall reading (many moons ago) that EMX GDB does not work
   > very well under MSDOS, it's much happier under OS/2.

and Michael Castle <mcastle AT umr DOT edu> straightened me out:

   I *think* the extender for emx allows multitasking (up to 4 tasks) of emx
   compiled programs... thus gdb will work with with emx under dos

   i've not used this feature though... just heard that it's available

Of course this sort of multi-tasking is necessary, but what I'd heard
was that it's possible to confuse the extender or GDB or both in this
environment.  I *don't* think that this is *preemptive* multitasking,
and thus you cannot interrupt an infinite loop etc (or is that
possible with protected mode programming?) without rebooting and
trashing the evidence.  Also there was a rumor that either EMX itself
or RSX (another extender which works in the EMX environment) doesn't
support GDB because it didn't support multi-tasking.  Again, this is
pretty vaporous.
    My original thought was that it might be useful to the folks who
were looking for a debugger.  Also, it would be nice to nip the "why
doesn't somebody [else!] port GDB for us" thread at the spool.  So I
mentioned the multi-tasking in hopes of cooling their ardor.

--Steve