A Symbolic Debugger for Powerpc-based Hardware, Using the Engineering Support Processor (esp)

For debugging PowerPC-based hardware systems, there is a tool named the Engineering Support Processor (ESP) that accesses and controls the chip via the JTAG interface. With the ESP, a user can debug a target system by starting and stopping it, accessing registers and memory, and so on. However, with ESP alone, it is di cult to symbolically debug programs written in high-level languages such as C. Therefore, we have developed a mechanism for using the GNU debugger (GDB), which is a widely-used symbolic debugger, through the ESP. This mechanism is implemented by a program named GDBserver, which mediates between a host-GDB and the ESP. This report describes its structure and detailed implementation.