Design of the OS Debugger Daemon,

In order to facilitate the timely development of the Tera Operating System OS, the ability to perform source level debugging of that OS is a critical requirement. Additionally, a source level debugger will be of great help in diagnosing future system problems both in-house and at customer sites. This document describes the portion of the OS debugger that resides on the Tera machine and communicates with a GDB style front end running on some Sun workstation. The front end will often be running on the maintenance workstation although it could be run on any Sun workstation so long as a data path were made available to the Tera machine. The Tera native portion of the debugger is referred to as the GDB tele-debug symbiote, in GDB parlance, or as the Tera OS debugger daemon as it will be referred to in this document. A principle goal in implementing this daemon is to provide a debugging capability that is operable even when most of the OS might not be. To accomplish this, the daemon must be as self sufficient as possible, at least to the extent that it need not rely on any OS services. It may use those services, but should have various fallbacks available to provide some minimum functionality.