Creating GADP client stub

[behunin]

I am looking into creating a GADP client stub for the yuzu emulator and just want to see if this is a good idea and if so then what is the correct way to start the connection. Usually I would gather this information from docs but I can't find any.

As you can see here there is already a GDB stub for the project. I know Ghidra works with GDB but I am just curious as to what I can do with GADP.

[d-millar]

@behunin I’m not sure what the use care here would be that would merit the work, particularly given the existence of the gdbstub. The primary use cases for GADP are two: (1) it isolates the JVM running Ghidra proper from the JVM running the debugger agent, so that a crash in the debugger will not destroy any current session/work in Ghidra, and (2) it facilitates a server/client setup when you need the agent to run on a different machine. While you could write a GADP server to support your target, you would essentially have no model to build on, as the existing agent models assume the existence of some underlying native debugger.

[d-millar]

Entirely possible - just not something we would recommend.

[behunin]

I fail to see why you do not recommend this other than, that's not how you designed it.
So I still wish to pursue this endeavor and I would like some guidance please.

[d-millar]

@behunin Well, you asked if it was a good idea.... That said, assuming you still wanted to pursue this, you will need to implement the basic protocol, the server-side handler for it, and some flavor of DebuggerObjectModel. Given your target, you would presumably be re-implementing something similar to the gdb variant but in C rather than Java. This would essentially mean porting the code in Ghidra/Debug/Debugger-agent-gdb and Ghidra/Debug/Debugger-gadp to C. Obviously, you could pare this down a bit to the functionality you wanted, but it's still a large fraction of this code.

[behunin]

Thank you @d-millar
I wanted to make sure I vetted this idea just to make sure it wasn't a futile pursuit.

Implementing basic protocol is trivial with boost asio and C++ files generated with protoc.
I will port GadpClient to C++ and see where that gets me.

[d-millar]

Just to be clear, you need to implement GadpServer and a model. The protocol will be trivial; the model will not.