Enabling GADP Agent standalone execution?

[hedgeberg]

What would it take to make it possible to launch one of the provided GADP agents without launching the full Ghidra installation? Looking at the source for GDB's GADP agent, it looks like it was intended to be launched from the command line (see here) but I can't find any documentation or code indicating that the standalone operation feature survived into release. Being able to do something like launch one of the GADP agents via something like "${SCRIPT_DIR}"/support/launch.sh bg Ghidra "${MAXMEM}" "" ghidra.GADPGDB"$@" would be really helpful for setups that involve complex networking where the intent is to debug something running on a target device of a different architecture.

Also, if there were an option to launch the GADP agents without producing the server popup, that would make life a lot easier for some of the stranger debugging setups I've created.

Is there any plan currently to add standalone launching of the agents, or "headless" launching, to the 10.0 release? If not, what would it take to insert a new launcher option to the set of supported options?

[d-millar]

@hedgeberg I'm not sure this is exactly what you're looking for, but, if you build the agent as a jar, you can run it standalone using "java -jar nodepJar". The build command is:
gradle nodepJar
or, if you prefer to restrict it to a single agent:
gradle Debugger-agent-gdb:nodepJar (or pick the name of the agent you want)

[hedgeberg]

Build appears to have succeeded after adding duplicatesStrategy = 'warn' to the nodepJar task in Ghidra/Debug/Debugger-agent-gdb/build.gradle, but it gives a lot of warnings of the form:

Encountered duplicate path "images/checkmark_green.gif" during copy operation configured with DuplicateStrategy.WARN

Is there a "correct" way to handle this kind of duplicate conflict within Gradle? Because even if this solution works, it doesn't seem like its the way Gradle "wants" us to be doing it, which makes me worried that upgrading in the future will cause further problems.

[nsadeveloper789]

Uh, "correctness" is in the eye of the beholder? Honestly, I'm not sure. At the moment, I was just trying to find the quick fix for you. Unfortunately, the dependency graph among our projects kind of sucks, so the no-dep jar winds up including a whole lot more stuff than it actually needs, and the .gif in question is one of them. What I'll probably wind up doing is just explicitly excluding certain paths, e.g. images/* that I know aren't needed, and that are likely to produce duplicates. If I run into duplicate .class files, then it would seem something else is seriously wrong.

[hedgeberg]

So... on the one hand, it seems the standalone jar runs just fine...

On the other hand, uh, I hate to do this to you guys, but here's some other snippets from that warning log.....

Encountered duplicate path "org/osgi/service/url/URLConstants.class" during copy operation configured with DuplicatesStrategy.WARN
Encountered duplicate path "org/osgi/service/url/URLStreamHandlerService.class" during copy operation configured with DuplicatesStrategy.WARN
Encountered duplicate path "org/osgi/service/url/URLStreamHandlerSetter.class" during copy operation configured with DuplicatesStrategy.WARN
Encountered duplicate path "org/osgi/service/url/package-info.class" during copy operation configured with DuplicatesStrategy.WARN
Encountered duplicate path "org/osgi/util/tracker/AbstractTracked.class" during copy operation configured with DuplicatesStrategy.WARN
Encountered duplicate path "org/osgi/util/tracker/BundleTracker$Tracked.class" during copy operation configured with DuplicatesStrategy.WARN
Encountered duplicate path "org/osgi/util/tracker/BundleTracker.class" during copy operation configured with DuplicatesStrategy.WARN
Encountered duplicate path "org/osgi/util/tracker/BundleTrackerCustomizer.class" during copy operation configured with DuplicatesStrategy.WARN
Encountered duplicate path "org/osgi/util/tracker/ServiceTracker$AllTracked.class" during copy operation configured with DuplicatesStrategy.WARN
Encountered duplicate path "org/osgi/util/tracker/ServiceTracker$Tracked.class" during copy operation configured with DuplicatesStrategy.WARN
Encountered duplicate path "org/osgi/util/tracker/ServiceTracker.class" during copy operation configured with DuplicatesStrategy.WARN
Encountered duplicate path "org/osgi/util/tracker/ServiceTrackerCustomizer.class" during copy operation configured with DuplicatesStrategy.WARN
Encountered duplicate path "org/osgi/util/tracker/package-info.class" during copy operation configured with DuplicatesStrategy.WARN
Encountered duplicate path "org/osgi/util/tracker/packageinfo" during copy operation configured with DuplicatesStrategy.WARN

Sorry @nsadeveloper789 but it seems like there's a bunch of re-included .class files from org/osgi and OSGI-OPT/src/org/osgi. Anything I can do to help triage?

[hedgeberg]

Went ahead and dumped the whole debug log, commands to generate this log (from the ghidra root dir) were:

rm -rf ./Ghidra/Debug/Debugger-agent-gdb/build
gradle :Debugger-agent-gdb:executableJar | tee -a ./agent_build_log.txt

Log file is linked below, let me know if I can get you anything else.

agent_build_log.txt

[nsadeveloper789]

eek. OK. Thanks for the heads-up. It should work fine for you, but for the sake of cleanliness, that's something I should look at more carefully.