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1: ==Possible Future MDB Enhancements==
2: 
3: This page is a collection of random thoughts from those who have been working on
4: MDB or participating in the discussion forums.  These are non-trivial projects
5: that range from the mundane to the completely insane.  Before trying your hand
6: at any of these projects, be sure to contact one of the community leaders for
7: assistance.  They are roughly ordered by degree of complexity.
8: 
9: ===vi mode===
10: 
11: This would create a separate CLI mode for vi compatbility (via "::set -o vi").
12: It would basically mimic the vi mode of your favorite shell.  Prototypes of this
13: exist; be sure to contact Eric Schrock if you’re interested in this.  The
14: official BugID for this request is
15: [[4414259>>http://bugs.opensolaris.org/bugdatabase/view_bug.do?bug_id=4414259]].
16: 
17: ===Tab completion===
18: 
19: Another CLI enhancement, this proposes to add simple tab completion to MDB.
20: Pretty much the only thing we can safely do is symbol completion and dcmd/walker
21: completion.  Any attempt to tab-complete arguments would get pretty hairy pretty
22: quickly.
23: 
24: ===Conditional breakpoints===
25: 
26: MDB supports command execution on each breakpoint by which you can implement a
27: poor man’s conditional breakpoint, but it’s complicated, and on KMDB results in the debugger repeatedly stopping and producing unnecessary output.  It would be nice if this was a built in feature that didn’t require so much extra work.
28: 
29: ===CTF line number support===
30: 
31: Add basic line number information to CTF, so that we can do a first pass at
32: source level debugging.  This would not include advanced logic to display actual
33: source, or necessarily step between lines of a source file.  The most basic
34: implementation would simply display disassembler annotated with the appropriate
35: file and line information.
36: 
37: ===Native DWARF/STABS support===
38: 
39: A much more significant project, this would be a debug-format agnostic library
40: that understood CTF as well as DWARF and STABS information.  We would like to
41: make the CTF tools an official supported tool shipped with Solaris (instead of
42: a build companion tool), but it would be extremely convenient for external
43: developers to not have to worry about this.  The main requirement would be
44: transparent access to type information, but could also include line number
45: support to enable source level debugging.
46: 
47: ===Source level debugging===
48: 
49: This would require one or both of the above projects to be implemented, and
50: would build an infrastructure to get and display annotated source, well as
51: step over individual lines, and get and set breakpoints based on source
52: locations.
53: 
54: ===Alternate grammar support===
55: 
56: The current MDB language is based around historical adb(1) compatability.  This
57: doesn’t always translate into the most usable interface.  It would be feasible
58: to design a modular architecture such that the language interpreter could be
59: changed on the fly to support more user-friendly modes.
60: 
61: ===C comparison language===
62: 
63: The current {{code}}::grep{{/code}} implementation is severely limited in what it can
64: accomplish.  A more complete solution would leverage a more advanced compiler
65: (possibly the D compiler) to create a more complete language for conditional
66: comparison.  The idea would be something like {{code}}::walk proc | ::dgrep ((proc_t *).)->p_user.u_comm == "ls"{{/code}}.
67: 
68: ===libmdb===
69: 
70: The nirvana of MDB development.  Architect MDB in such a way that the bulk of
71: the debugger logic lives inside a library.  KMDB and MDB simply become consumers
72: providing a thin veneer on top of this library coupled with a large set of
73: module support.  This would enable a whole host of possibilities, not the least
74: of which is a GUI debugger.
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