Displaying multi-byte values in the Memory view

[gshrikant]

It would be useful to add support to display memory words (16/32/64 bits) in the Memory view akin to the gdb x command. The gdb x command is often used with more than 1 byte arguments and similar functionality would be nice to have in the dashboard.

I'm already working on this but I wanted to document this feature request if someone else has this on mind too. In either case, I'll try to send a pull request soon. :-)

[cyrus-and]

Premise: the Memory module is not a replacement for the GDB x command. Even if it would be somewhat nice to have all the expressive power of such command I don't feel like to re-implement all the format configurations nor to use the output of x itself. Moreover, even focusing on the size only, we have to consider that the x command takes into account endianness in printing multi-byte values.

For the above reasons I decided to make the Memory module as simple as possible, it's easy to start improving its format and ending up with an huge unmaintainable module.

A similar issue concerns the Expressions module as it might involve formatting options too.

Actually, I have no great solution for this... The idea is to use the Memory module to obtain a raw memory dump given an address, while the Expression module, using casts, to have a bit more control on the interpretation. For example, to simulate x/10xh data one could use:

dashboard expressions watch ((short*)data)[0]@10

Remember that the values printed by the Expression and History modules are subject to the GDB input/output preferences (I should probably mention this in the doc...). So to display hexadecimal values one could issue:

set radix 16

I'm aware that this is not as versatile as the native GDB formatting mechanism, but I think it can be a fair trade off, also considering that GDB dashboard is not a proper front end, rather, a visualization aid.

[GulinSS]

set radix 16

Or try set output-radix 16. Worked for me as well.

Hi from 2025! Still impressive module! Thanks much!