On Sun, Oct 19, 2008 at 19:37, Michael Crawford <mdcrawford@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > So I might as well just use BSD's protocol. Hello there, Again: there's not much of a protocol to speak of, not related to Haiku anyway. Each vendor implemented their own solution, and it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to implement Darwin's protocol, or FreeBSD's, or Microsoft's, or Linux's. What would be useful, however, is to implement a serial console-like interface over Firewire, and then arrange to attach it straight to KDL on the target side, and have any terminal emulator read from a character device published by the host side Firewire debug app as if it were a regular serial interface, or to use the Firewire debug app to proxy the I/O over a socket, like FreeBSD, Linux and maybe even Mac OS X do (haven't investigated much what happens there), and attach GDB to it in remote debugging mode. Anyway: each of those OSs impement a way to proxy commands sent over Firewire to what would be a remote GDB facility on the kernel, which IIRC we have, and client-side the debugger is indeed attached via a socket, just like if it were happening over ethernet and TCP/IP. But we also have KDL, and I don't quite know how GDB and remote GDB compare in features on Haiku. So emulating a null modem cable would work under any circumnstances, and having the client-side publish either a serial tty-like interface or to proxy the data stream over a socket both work too, one suiting KDL debugging, and the other suiting remote GDB sessions. I *think* a console driver like dcons, and having the option to attach to it as a char device (or a pair of pipes) or a socket, would suit us perfectly. And wouldn't be difficult to port among Unix-like hosts. It might be even straightforward to port to Windows as well. I posted the link to the description of dcons-over-firewire on the other thread, but here it goes again, just in case it went unnoticed :) http://wiki.freebsd.org/DebugWithDcons Cheers, A.