Debugging with Gdb in RISCV (spike: unrecognized option --gdb-port) - gdb

Question

After building the RISCV tools and GCC (cloned from lowrisc, isa-sim and not riscv-tools), i'm stuck in the debugging with Gdb phase here.
In the second terminal target remote in gdb times out.
In the first terminal when i run spike --gdb-port 9824 pk tests/debug or spike --gdb-port 9824 pk hello.c it yields:
spike: unrecognized option --gdb-port
usage: spike [host options] <target program> [target options]
Host Options:
-p <n> Simulate <n> processors
-m <n> Provide <n> MB of target memory
-d Interactive debug mode
-g Track histogram of PCs
-h Print this help message
--ic=<S>:<W>:<B> Instantiate a cache model with S sets,
--dc=<S>:<W>:<B> W ways, and B-byte blocks (with S and
--l2=<S>:<W>:<B> B both powers of 2).
--extension=<name> Specify RoCC Extension
--extlib=<name> Shared library to load
I don't know if it has to do with configuring gdb on its own ? Or is it built and configured when i ran ./build.sh for the riscv tools.
If not, could you please correct the --gdb-port command (I'm new to linux) I've tried --gdb-port=9824 or --gdb-port:9824 and it's the same.
Thank you

Answer 1

Message spike: unrecognized option --gdb-port says that spike, not gdb can't recognize option. Spike is from riscv-isa-sim, not from riscv-tools. And LowRisc variant of Spike - https://github.com/lowRISC/riscv-isa-sim is many commits behind master:
This branch is 3 commits ahead, 172 commits behind riscv:master.
Latest commit e220bc4 on May 19, 2016 #wsong83 wsong83 Merge commit '0d084d5' into update
One of not ported commit added gdb support to spike from https://github.com/riscv/riscv-isa-sim (and documented it in https://github.com/riscv/riscv-isa-sim#debugging-with-gdb), but it is not pulled to https://github.com/lowRISC/riscv-isa-sim (and not documented at https://github.com/lowRISC/riscv-isa-sim). gdb-related commits were from Oct 2016, Jun 2016, May 2016, and the --gdb-port was added in d1d8863086c57f04236418f21ef8a7fbfc184b0b (Mar 19, 2016) https://github.com/riscv/riscv-isa-sim/commit/d1d8863086c57f04236418f21ef8a7fbfc184b0b
+ fprintf(stderr, " --gdb-port=<port> Listen on <port> for gdb to connect\n");
+ parser.option(0, "gdb-port", 1, [&](const char* s){gdb_port = atoi(s);});
You can try merging changes between isa sims or ask lowRisc authors to merge or just try to use spike from riscv...