GDB - create buffer to show information about CPU registers

[Dan Čermák]

Hi list,

I am currently using Emacs for developing on an embedded ARM CPU and
spend a lot of time debugging it with gdb. I have to frequently check
the contents of CPU registers to find out what went wrong again. Please
note that I am not referring to the 'actual' CPU registers (like r0, r1,
pc, sp, etc) but to memory locations which can be used to get and set
the status of certain components of the CPU. In these typically every
bit has a special meaning (e.g. whether an interrupt flag is set).

My currently biggest issue with my setup is, that to get some
information from a register, I have to print its content with gdb (from
inside Emacs), put that into the mate-calculator to find which bits are
set and which are not and finally open up the datasheet of the CPU and
look up the meaning of each bit.

As you can guess, that is quite tedious and inefficient. Especially
compared to the 'official' IDE provided by the CPU vendor (which is
based on Eclipse), where you can access all CPU registers via a GUI,
which also shows you the value of each bit and its meaning. However, I
don't want to use the Eclipse IDE, since it's a) not Emacs and b) it's
horrendously slow & bloated.

Obviously Emacs cannot provide that out of the box, since it is missing
all the information about the CPU memory. Is anyone aware of a package
that would provide me with such a functionality, where I only have to
add the necessary data about each CPU register? If not, what would you
recommend to use to implement something like in the Eclipse based IDE? I
am unfortunately fairly new to Elisp & Emacs programming, so I have no
clue where to start to extend the functionality.


Thanks in advance for any suggestions,

Dan