How to debug linux/amd64 applications on Macbook with arm64?

[hitzhangjie]

I encounter this problem and search the relevant issues:

1. install docker desktop, run linux/amd64 container
2. with rosetta, the linux/amd64 container can run on Macbok arm64 in nearly native speed
3. in the linux/amd64 container, install dlv, debug the target process
4. dlv will report error like "Command failed: input/output failed"

rosetta will convert the amd64 instructions to arm64 instructions ahead-of-time, so it can run in nearly native speed.

dlv debugging may encounter problems:

1. breakpoint, implemented with patching the instruction. The patched instruction maybe converted before?
2. ....
3. I haven't tested other commands

I found many dlv users reported similar issues. Don't know if can work around this.

---

I found this: https://sporks.space/2023/04/12/debugging-an-x86-application-in-rosetta-for-linux/

$ /media/rosetta/rosetta 
Usage: rosetta <x86_64 ELF to run>

Optional environment variables:
ROSETTA_DEBUGSERVER_PORT    wait for a debugger connection on given port

version: Rosetta-289.7

This article said rosetta has an environment to wait for a incoming debugging connection. I think this special embeded debugger may handle some special logic for debugger frontend.

I haven't tested as the article says. Just want to discuss the difficulties and underlying solutions if we want to work around this.
If we can fix this with limited efforts, it would be great.

ps: Macbook Pro is many developers' choice, Macbook Pro M1 ~ M4 has really good performance. Even though I have Macbook M1 pro before, but I know little about rosetta, I only tried QEMU and UTM, it's too slow. Several days ago, I got a new Macbook M4 Pro, I tried rosetta this time, it help running linux/amd64 applications in nearly native speed. Well then, I encounter the debugging problem. That's the background I come up with the discussion.

[aarzilli]

On un-emulated darwin we launch debugserver and speak to it using a text protocol; the code for this is in pkg/proc/gdbserial. I suspect it could be possible to adapt it to connect to the debugserver provided by rosetta. Some of the code in gdbserial uses runtime.GOOS and runtime.GOARCH, that would have to be changed and also we'd have to detect that rosetta will be used and set ROSETTA_DEBUGSERVER_PORT before starting the inferior.

[aarzilli]

Closing, duplicate of #2910