[linuxtools-dev] PTP and the Linux Tools Project support for remote buil

[Corey Ashford <cjashfor@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi,

I had a brief discussion today with Jeff Johnston on the IRC channel
today.  I had been experimenting with the new Valgrind support for
remote launch via RSE connections.  I ran into a strange problem and it
turned out to be because I had misunderstood the intent of the remote
launch capability, that it is designed for a "cross-compile/link,
download executable, remote launch Valgrind" workflow, rather than a
"remote build, remote launch Valgrind" workflow.  Knowing this allowed
me to understand why the dialogs didn't allow me to choose an executable
residing on the remote machine.

To take a quick step back, we in IBM toolchain team are wanting to use
remote Valgrind launches in the "remote build, remote launch" workflow.

The Eclipse PTP project already has some nice support for remote builds,
remote launch, and remote debug (though remote debug requires an
intermediary process called SDM).  The usability of PTP connections, in
my opinion, is much cleaner than that of RSE.  RSE requires manually
starting the RSE server on the remote machine, opening holes in the
firewall, etc.  PTP uses ssh connections to communicate with its
dynamically downloaded java-based dstore daemon.  All of its
communication goes through ssh, so no firewall hole poking is needed.
What is needed on the remote side is to install Java and sdm (sdm is
needed only for debugging).

One thing I didn't mention about setting up PTP, is that in order to
launch a remote executable, debug, profile, etc., you need to start up a
"Resource Manager".  Fortunately this is easy to do.  There are a number
of Resource Manager types to choose from, and the generic "Remote
Launch" resource manager works just fine for single remote host setups.

What do you think of utilizing PTP for adding remote build, remote
launch capability to the Linux Tools Project plug-ins?  There's been a
lot of work and refinement that's gone into PTP over the years, and I
think Linux Tools could benefit from it.  We could structure it so that
the remote build, remote launch are separate features that people
wouldn't have to install, if they didn't want to install PTP when they
install Linux Tools.

If you haven't played with PTP before, there's a nice tutorial here:
http://download.eclipse.org/tools/ptp/docs/ptp-sc10-tutorial.pdf


- Corey