rocm-gdb in the official repos?

[simark]

Hi!

Is there a reason why rocm-gdb is not in the official repos?

The support for debugging in the AMD KFD module wasn't in the upstream Linux kernel until somewhat recently, so I can imagine that it would have been useless to have an official rocm-gdb package before.

FWIW, I tested changing the PKGBUILD to point to the 6.0.2 release, and it builds and runs fine (although only lightly tested).

I'm a gdb developer and also contribute to ROCgdb, so I'd be happy to help get rocm-gdb in the official repos, if that's what you want.

Thanks,

Simon

[tpkessler]

Hi Simon!

That's a very nice surprise. Thank you for pointing me to the kernel commit. Indeed. the main reason why rocm-gdb was not in the official repos was the lack of support by the mainline linux kernel. Do you have suggestions for configure flags before I add to the Arch repos?

Cheers,
Torsten

[simark]

What you have already seems to work. But since you ask:

• If it works, I would remove --disable-nls, to let people have GDB in whatever language they want (not that I use it, and I don't even know the state of translations)
• $CHOST in --enable-targets="$CHOST,amdgcn-amd-amdhsa" is unnecessary, I think. Since you don't specify a --target, the default target will be the same as the host (i.e. x86_64-pc-linux-gnu), and is automatically included. If you pass --enable-targets="amdgcn-amd-amdhsa", the support for that target will be in addition to the default target.
• There's an approximately 0% chance that --with-babeltrace is useful to anybody, I would remove it (it's been on my todo list for a while to remove it from upstream GDB).
• I see that you don't use --disable-binutils, which means binutils binaries are built and shipped. I think that's fine, since there is a chance that the ROCm release of binutils-gdb contains some changes to better support inspecting AMD GPU binaries, that vanilla binutils tools don't have. You could think of packaging it separately as a rocm-binutils package, but it's not a big deal.
• You could add --disable-gprof.
• You used --disable-gdbserver, which I think is fine. There's no support currently for debugging ROCm programs with ROCgdb through gdbserver, so it would be pointless to ship it.
• --disable-shared seems unnecessary to me.

I then looked at the built package itself, there is a bunch of stuff (headers, libraries) that come from bfd, binutils, and other projects in the binutils-gdb source tree (I know, it's a bit of a mess with all those projects in the same tree). I think it would make sense to run "make install" in the gdb directory only. This is what the gdb package does:

https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/packaging/packages/gdb/-/blob/main/PKGBUILD?ref_type=heads#L53

[tpkessler]

Thank you very much for your suggestions! I've updated the configure flags and moved rocm-gdb to the official repos.

[simark]

Thanks!