Debug IPC

This is the shared IPC code between the debug agent (code in ../debug_agent) and the zxdb frontend (code in ../zxdb). It's not useful for other programs. Client debugging code should use the client debug library in ../zxdb/client.

This is a super simple custom IPC format because it is intended to be used between two computers (unlike FIDL) and called at a very low level when debugging the system (when higher-level primitives should be avoided). The goal is to replace it with a more robust IPC library when one is provided for the system that can communicate off-device.

Protocol information

  • Structs are defined with sized types and serialized little-endian such that they can be memcpy'd on little-endian machines.

  • Vectors are serialized as a 32-bit count followed by the number of records serialized in the normal manner.

  • Strings are serialized as a 32-bit size followed by that number of 8-bit characters. No encoding is specified, the data is not null terminated.