1 What has changed in GDB?
2 (Organized release by release)
4 *** Changes since GDB 7.2
6 * GDB has a new command: "thread find [REGEXP]".
7 It finds the thread id whose name, target id, or thread extra info
8 matches the given regular expression.
10 * The "catch syscall" command now works on mips*-linux* targets.
12 * The -data-disassemble MI command now supports modes 2 and 3 for
13 dumping the instruction opcodes.
15 * New command line options
17 -data-directory DIR Specify DIR as the "data-directory".
18 This is mostly for testing purposes.
20 * The "maint set python auto-load on|off" command has been renamed to
21 "set auto-load-scripts on|off".
23 * GDB has a new command: "set directories".
24 It is like the "dir" command except that it replaces the
25 source path list instead of augmenting it.
27 * GDB now understands thread names.
29 On GNU/Linux, "info threads" will display the thread name as set by
30 prctl or pthread_setname_np.
32 There is also a new command, "thread name", which can be used to
33 assign a name internally for GDB to display.
36 Initial support for the OpenCL C language (http://www.khronos.org/opencl)
37 has been integrated into GDB.
41 ** Breakpoints can now be sub-classed in Python, and in particular
42 you may implement a 'stop' function that is executed each time
43 the inferior reaches that breakpoint.
45 ** New function gdb.lookup_global_symbol looks up a global symbol.
47 ** GDB values in Python are now callable if the value represents a
48 function. For example, if 'some_value' represents a function that
49 takes two integer parameters and returns a value, you can call
50 that function like so:
52 result = some_value (10,20)
54 ** Module gdb.types has been added.
55 It contains a collection of utilities for working with gdb.Types objects:
56 get_basic_type, has_field, make_enum_dict.
58 ** Module gdb.printing has been added.
59 It contains utilities for writing and registering pretty-printers.
60 New classes: PrettyPrinter, SubPrettyPrinter,
61 RegexpCollectionPrettyPrinter.
62 New function: register_pretty_printer.
64 ** New commands "info pretty-printers", "enable pretty-printer" and
65 "disable pretty-printer" have been added.
67 ** gdb.parameter("directories") is now available.
69 ** New function gdb.newest_frame returns the newest frame in the
72 ** The gdb.InferiorThread class has a new "name" attribute. This
73 holds the thread's name.
75 ** Python Support for Inferior events.
76 Python scripts can add observers to be notified of events
77 occurring in the process being debugged.
78 The following events are currently supported:
79 - gdb.events.cont Continue event.
80 - gdb.events.exited Inferior exited event.
81 - gdb.events.stop Signal received, and Breakpoint hit events.
85 ** GDB now puts template parameters in scope when debugging in an
86 instantiation. For example, if you have:
88 template<int X> int func (void) { return X; }
90 then if you step into func<5>, "print X" will show "5". This
91 feature requires proper debuginfo support from the compiler; it
94 ** The motion commands "next", "finish", "until", and "advance" now
95 work better when exceptions are thrown. In particular, GDB will
96 no longer lose control of the inferior; instead, the GDB will
97 stop the inferior at the point at which the exception is caught.
98 This functionality requires a change in the exception handling
99 code that was introduced in GCC 4.5.
101 * GDB now follows GCC's rules on accessing volatile objects when
102 reading or writing target state during expression evaluation.
103 One notable difference to prior behavior is that "print x = 0"
104 no longer generates a read of x; the value of the assignment is
105 now always taken directly from the value being assigned.
107 * GDB now has some support for using labels in the program's source in
108 linespecs. For instance, you can use "advance label" to continue
109 execution to a label.
111 * GDB now has support for reading and writing a new .gdb_index
112 section. This section holds a fast index of DWARF debugging
113 information and can be used to greatly speed up GDB startup and
114 operation. See the documentation for `save gdb-index' for details.
116 * The "watch" command now accepts an optional "-location" argument.
117 When used, this causes GDB to watch the memory referred to by the
118 expression. Such a watchpoint is never deleted due to it going out
121 * GDB now supports thread debugging of core dumps on GNU/Linux.
123 GDB now activates thread debugging using the libthread_db library
124 when debugging GNU/Linux core dumps, similarly to when debugging
125 live processes. As a result, when debugging a core dump file, GDB
126 is now able to display pthread_t ids of threads. For example, "info
127 threads" shows the same output as when debugging the process when it
128 was live. In earlier releases, you'd see something like this:
131 * 1 LWP 6780 main () at main.c:10
133 While now you see this:
136 * 1 Thread 0x7f0f5712a700 (LWP 6780) main () at main.c:10
138 It is also now possible to inspect TLS variables when debugging core
141 When debugging a core dump generated on a machine other than the one
142 used to run GDB, you may need to point GDB at the correct
143 libthread_db library with the "set libthread-db-search-path"
144 command. See the user manual for more details on this command.
146 * New features in the GDB remote stub, GDBserver
148 ** GDBserver is now supported on PowerPC LynxOS (versions 4.x and 5.x),
149 and i686 LynxOS (version 5.x).
151 ** GDBserver is now supported on Blackfin Linux.
153 * New native configurations
155 ia64 HP-UX ia64-*-hpux*
159 Analog Devices, Inc. Blackfin Processor bfin-*
161 * Ada task switching is now supported on sparc-elf targets when
162 debugging a program using the Ravenscar Profile. For more information,
163 see the "Tasking Support when using the Ravenscar Profile" section
164 in the GDB user manual.
166 * Guile support was removed.
168 * New features in the GNU simulator
170 ** The --map-info flag lists all known core mappings.
172 *** Changes in GDB 7.2
174 * Shared library support for remote targets by default
176 When GDB is configured for a generic, non-OS specific target, like
177 for example, --target=arm-eabi or one of the many *-*-elf targets,
178 GDB now queries remote stubs for loaded shared libraries using the
179 `qXfer:libraries:read' packet. Previously, shared library support
180 was always disabled for such configurations.
184 ** Argument Dependent Lookup (ADL)
186 In C++ ADL lookup directs function search to the namespaces of its
187 arguments even if the namespace has not been imported.
197 Here the compiler will search for `foo' in the namespace of 'b'
198 and find A::foo. GDB now supports this. This construct is commonly
199 used in the Standard Template Library for operators.
201 ** Improved User Defined Operator Support
203 In addition to member operators, GDB now supports lookup of operators
204 defined in a namespace and imported with a `using' directive, operators
205 defined in the global scope, operators imported implicitly from an
206 anonymous namespace, and the ADL operators mentioned in the previous
208 GDB now also supports proper overload resolution for all the previously
209 mentioned flavors of operators.
211 ** static const class members
213 Printing of static const class members that are initialized in the
214 class definition has been fixed.
216 * Windows Thread Information Block access.
218 On Windows targets, GDB now supports displaying the Windows Thread
219 Information Block (TIB) structure. This structure is visible either
220 by using the new command `info w32 thread-information-block' or, by
221 dereferencing the new convenience variable named `$_tlb', a
222 thread-specific pointer to the TIB. This feature is also supported
223 when remote debugging using GDBserver.
227 Static tracepoints are calls in the user program into a tracing
228 library. One such library is a port of the LTTng kernel tracer to
229 userspace --- UST (LTTng Userspace Tracer, http://lttng.org/ust).
230 When debugging with GDBserver, GDB now supports combining the GDB
231 tracepoint machinery with such libraries. For example: the user can
232 use GDB to probe a static tracepoint marker (a call from the user
233 program into the tracing library) with the new "strace" command (see
234 "New commands" below). This creates a "static tracepoint" in the
235 breakpoint list, that can be manipulated with the same feature set
236 as fast and regular tracepoints. E.g., collect registers, local and
237 global variables, collect trace state variables, and define
238 tracepoint conditions. In addition, the user can collect extra
239 static tracepoint marker specific data, by collecting the new
240 $_sdata internal variable. When analyzing the trace buffer, you can
241 inspect $_sdata like any other variable available to GDB. For more
242 information, see the "Tracepoints" chapter in GDB user manual. New
243 remote packets have been defined to support static tracepoints, see
244 the "New remote packets" section below.
246 * Better reconstruction of tracepoints after disconnected tracing
248 GDB will attempt to download the original source form of tracepoint
249 definitions when starting a trace run, and then will upload these
250 upon reconnection to the target, resulting in a more accurate
251 reconstruction of the tracepoints that are in use on the target.
255 You can now exercise direct control over the ways that GDB can
256 affect your program. For instance, you can disallow the setting of
257 breakpoints, so that the program can run continuously (assuming
258 non-stop mode). In addition, the "observer" variable is available
259 to switch all of the different controls; in observer mode, GDB
260 cannot affect the target's behavior at all, which is useful for
261 tasks like diagnosing live systems in the field.
263 * The new convenience variable $_thread holds the number of the
270 Return the address of the Windows Thread Information Block of a given thread.
274 In response to several of the tracepoint packets, the target may now
275 also respond with a number of intermediate `qRelocInsn' request
276 packets before the final result packet, to have GDB handle
277 relocating an instruction to execute at a different address. This
278 is particularly useful for stubs that support fast tracepoints. GDB
279 reports support for this feature in the qSupported packet.
283 List static tracepoint markers in the target program.
287 List static tracepoint markers at a given address in the target
290 qXfer:statictrace:read
292 Read the static trace data collected (by a `collect $_sdata'
293 tracepoint action). The remote stub reports support for this packet
294 to gdb's qSupported query.
298 Send the current settings of GDB's permission flags.
302 Send part of the source (textual) form of a tracepoint definition,
303 which includes location, conditional, and action list.
305 * The source command now accepts a -s option to force searching for the
306 script in the source search path even if the script name specifies
309 * New features in the GDB remote stub, GDBserver
311 - GDBserver now support tracepoints (including fast tracepoints, and
312 static tracepoints). The feature is currently supported by the
313 i386-linux and amd64-linux builds. See the "Tracepoints support
314 in gdbserver" section in the manual for more information.
316 GDBserver JIT compiles the tracepoint's conditional agent
317 expression bytecode into native code whenever possible for low
318 overhead dynamic tracepoints conditionals. For such tracepoints,
319 an expression that examines program state is evaluated when the
320 tracepoint is reached, in order to determine whether to capture
321 trace data. If the condition is simple and false, processing the
322 tracepoint finishes very quickly and no data is gathered.
324 GDBserver interfaces with the UST (LTTng Userspace Tracer) library
325 for static tracepoints support.
327 - GDBserver now supports x86_64 Windows 64-bit debugging.
329 * GDB now sends xmlRegisters= in qSupported packet to indicate that
330 it understands register description.
332 * The --batch flag now disables pagination and queries.
334 * X86 general purpose registers
336 GDB now supports reading/writing byte, word and double-word x86
337 general purpose registers directly. This means you can use, say,
338 $ah or $ax to refer, respectively, to the byte register AH and
339 16-bit word register AX that are actually portions of the 32-bit
340 register EAX or 64-bit register RAX.
342 * The `commands' command now accepts a range of breakpoints to modify.
343 A plain `commands' following a command that creates multiple
344 breakpoints affects all the breakpoints set by that command. This
345 applies to breakpoints set by `rbreak', and also applies when a
346 single `break' command creates multiple breakpoints (e.g.,
347 breakpoints on overloaded c++ functions).
349 * The `rbreak' command now accepts a filename specification as part of
350 its argument, limiting the functions selected by the regex to those
351 in the specified file.
353 * Support for remote debugging Windows and SymbianOS shared libraries
354 from Unix hosts has been improved. Non Windows GDB builds now can
355 understand target reported file names that follow MS-DOS based file
356 system semantics, such as file names that include drive letters and
357 use the backslash character as directory separator. This makes it
358 possible to transparently use the "set sysroot" and "set
359 solib-search-path" on Unix hosts to point as host copies of the
360 target's shared libraries. See the new command "set
361 target-file-system-kind" described below, and the "Commands to
362 specify files" section in the user manual for more information.
366 eval template, expressions...
367 Convert the values of one or more expressions under the control
368 of the string template to a command line, and call it.
370 set target-file-system-kind unix|dos-based|auto
371 show target-file-system-kind
372 Set or show the assumed file system kind for target reported file
375 save breakpoints <filename>
376 Save all current breakpoint definitions to a file suitable for use
377 in a later debugging session. To read the saved breakpoint
378 definitions, use the `source' command.
380 `save tracepoints' is a new alias for `save-tracepoints'. The latter
383 info static-tracepoint-markers
384 Display information about static tracepoint markers in the target.
386 strace FN | FILE:LINE | *ADDR | -m MARKER_ID
387 Define a static tracepoint by probing a marker at the given
388 function, line, address, or marker ID.
392 Enable and disable observer mode.
394 set may-write-registers on|off
395 set may-write-memory on|off
396 set may-insert-breakpoints on|off
397 set may-insert-tracepoints on|off
398 set may-insert-fast-tracepoints on|off
399 set may-interrupt on|off
400 Set individual permissions for GDB effects on the target. Note that
401 some of these settings can have undesirable or surprising
402 consequences, particularly when changed in the middle of a session.
403 For instance, disabling the writing of memory can prevent
404 breakpoints from being inserted, cause single-stepping to fail, or
405 even crash your program, if you disable after breakpoints have been
406 inserted. However, GDB should not crash.
408 set record memory-query on|off
409 show record memory-query
410 Control whether to stop the inferior if memory changes caused
411 by an instruction cannot be recorded.
416 The disassemble command now supports "start,+length" form of two arguments.
420 ** GDB now provides a new directory location, called the python directory,
421 where Python scripts written for GDB can be installed. The location
422 of that directory is <data-directory>/python, where <data-directory>
423 is the GDB data directory. For more details, see section `Scripting
424 GDB using Python' in the manual.
426 ** The GDB Python API now has access to breakpoints, symbols, symbol
427 tables, program spaces, inferiors, threads and frame's code blocks.
428 Additionally, GDB Parameters can now be created from the API, and
429 manipulated via set/show in the CLI.
431 ** New functions gdb.target_charset, gdb.target_wide_charset,
432 gdb.progspaces, gdb.current_progspace, and gdb.string_to_argv.
434 ** New exception gdb.GdbError.
436 ** Pretty-printers are now also looked up in the current program space.
438 ** Pretty-printers can now be individually enabled and disabled.
440 ** GDB now looks for names of Python scripts to auto-load in a
441 special section named `.debug_gdb_scripts', in addition to looking
442 for a OBJFILE-gdb.py script when OBJFILE is read by the debugger.
444 * Tracepoint actions were unified with breakpoint commands. In particular,
445 there are no longer differences in "info break" output for breakpoints and
446 tracepoints and the "commands" command can be used for both tracepoints and
451 ARM Symbian arm*-*-symbianelf*
453 * D language support.
454 GDB now supports debugging programs written in the D programming
457 * GDB now supports the extended ptrace interface for PowerPC which is
458 available since Linux kernel version 2.6.34. This automatically enables
459 any hardware breakpoints and additional hardware watchpoints available in
460 the processor. The old ptrace interface exposes just one hardware
461 watchpoint and no hardware breakpoints.
463 * GDB is now able to use the Data Value Compare (DVC) register available on
464 embedded PowerPC processors to implement in hardware simple watchpoint
465 conditions of the form:
467 watch ADDRESS|VARIABLE if ADDRESS|VARIABLE == CONSTANT EXPRESSION
469 This works in native GDB running on Linux kernels with the extended ptrace
470 interface mentioned above.
472 *** Changes in GDB 7.1
478 GDB now supports importing of namespaces in C++. This enables the
479 user to inspect variables from imported namespaces. Support for
480 namepace aliasing has also been added. So, if a namespace is
481 aliased in the current scope (e.g. namepace C=A; ) the user can
482 print variables using the alias (e.g. (gdb) print C::x).
486 All known bugs relating to the printing of virtual base class were
487 fixed. It is now possible to call overloaded static methods using a
492 The C++ cast operators static_cast<>, dynamic_cast<>, const_cast<>,
493 and reinterpret_cast<> are now handled by the C++ expression parser.
497 Xilinx MicroBlaze microblaze-*-*
502 Xilinx MicroBlaze microblaze
505 * Multi-program debugging.
507 GDB now has support for multi-program (a.k.a. multi-executable or
508 multi-exec) debugging. This allows for debugging multiple inferiors
509 simultaneously each running a different program under the same GDB
510 session. See "Debugging Multiple Inferiors and Programs" in the
511 manual for more information. This implied some user visible changes
512 in the multi-inferior support. For example, "info inferiors" now
513 lists inferiors that are not running yet or that have exited
514 already. See also "New commands" and "New options" below.
516 * New tracing features
518 GDB's tracepoint facility now includes several new features:
520 ** Trace state variables
522 GDB tracepoints now include support for trace state variables, which
523 are variables managed by the target agent during a tracing
524 experiment. They are useful for tracepoints that trigger each
525 other, so for instance one tracepoint can count hits in a variable,
526 and then a second tracepoint has a condition that is true when the
527 count reaches a particular value. Trace state variables share the
528 $-syntax of GDB convenience variables, and can appear in both
529 tracepoint actions and condition expressions. Use the "tvariable"
530 command to create, and "info tvariables" to view; see "Trace State
531 Variables" in the manual for more detail.
535 GDB now includes an option for defining fast tracepoints, which
536 targets may implement more efficiently, such as by installing a jump
537 into the target agent rather than a trap instruction. The resulting
538 speedup can be by two orders of magnitude or more, although the
539 tradeoff is that some program locations on some target architectures
540 might not allow fast tracepoint installation, for instance if the
541 instruction to be replaced is shorter than the jump. To request a
542 fast tracepoint, use the "ftrace" command, with syntax identical to
543 the regular trace command.
545 ** Disconnected tracing
547 It is now possible to detach GDB from the target while it is running
548 a trace experiment, then reconnect later to see how the experiment
549 is going. In addition, a new variable disconnected-tracing lets you
550 tell the target agent whether to continue running a trace if the
551 connection is lost unexpectedly.
555 GDB now has the ability to save the trace buffer into a file, and
556 then use that file as a target, similarly to you can do with
557 corefiles. You can select trace frames, print data that was
558 collected in them, and use tstatus to display the state of the
559 tracing run at the moment that it was saved. To create a trace
560 file, use "tsave <filename>", and to use it, do "target tfile
563 ** Circular trace buffer
565 You can ask the target agent to handle the trace buffer as a
566 circular buffer, discarding the oldest trace frames to make room for
567 newer ones, by setting circular-trace-buffer to on. This feature may
568 not be available for all target agents.
573 The disassemble command, when invoked with two arguments, now requires
574 the arguments to be comma-separated.
577 The info variables command now displays variable definitions. Files
578 which only declare a variable are not shown.
581 The source command is now capable of sourcing Python scripts.
582 This feature is dependent on the debugger being build with Python
585 Related to this enhancement is also the introduction of a new command
586 "set script-extension" (see below).
588 * New commands (for set/show, see "New options" below)
590 record save [<FILENAME>]
591 Save a file (in core file format) containing the process record
592 execution log for replay debugging at a later time.
594 record restore <FILENAME>
595 Restore the process record execution log that was saved at an
596 earlier time, for replay debugging.
598 add-inferior [-copies <N>] [-exec <FILENAME>]
601 clone-inferior [-copies <N>] [ID]
602 Make a new inferior ready to execute the same program another
608 maint info program-spaces
609 List the program spaces loaded into GDB.
611 set remote interrupt-sequence [Ctrl-C | BREAK | BREAK-g]
612 show remote interrupt-sequence
613 Allow the user to select one of ^C, a BREAK signal or BREAK-g
614 as the sequence to the remote target in order to interrupt the execution.
615 Ctrl-C is a default. Some system prefers BREAK which is high level of
616 serial line for some certain time. Linux kernel prefers BREAK-g, a.k.a
617 Magic SysRq g. It is BREAK signal and character 'g'.
619 set remote interrupt-on-connect [on | off]
620 show remote interrupt-on-connect
621 When interrupt-on-connect is ON, gdb sends interrupt-sequence to
622 remote target when gdb connects to it. This is needed when you debug
625 set remotebreak [on | off]
627 Deprecated. Use "set/show remote interrupt-sequence" instead.
629 tvariable $NAME [ = EXP ]
630 Create or modify a trace state variable.
633 List trace state variables and their values.
635 delete tvariable $NAME ...
636 Delete one or more trace state variables.
639 Evaluate the given expressions without collecting anything into the
640 trace buffer. (Valid in tracepoint actions only.)
642 ftrace FN / FILE:LINE / *ADDR
643 Define a fast tracepoint at the given function, line, or address.
645 * New expression syntax
647 GDB now parses the 0b prefix of binary numbers the same way as GCC does.
648 GDB now parses 0b101010 identically with 42.
652 set follow-exec-mode new|same
653 show follow-exec-mode
654 Control whether GDB reuses the same inferior across an exec call or
655 creates a new one. This is useful to be able to restart the old
656 executable after the inferior having done an exec call.
658 set default-collect EXPR, ...
660 Define a list of expressions to be collected at each tracepoint.
661 This is a useful way to ensure essential items are not overlooked,
662 such as registers or a critical global variable.
664 set disconnected-tracing
665 show disconnected-tracing
666 If set to 1, the target is instructed to continue tracing if it
667 loses its connection to GDB. If 0, the target is to stop tracing
670 set circular-trace-buffer
671 show circular-trace-buffer
672 If set to on, the target is instructed to use a circular trace buffer
673 and discard the oldest trace frames instead of stopping the trace due
674 to a full trace buffer. If set to off, the trace stops when the buffer
675 fills up. Some targets may not support this.
677 set script-extension off|soft|strict
678 show script-extension
679 If set to "off", the debugger does not perform any script language
680 recognition, and all sourced files are assumed to be GDB scripts.
681 If set to "soft" (the default), files are sourced according to
682 filename extension, falling back to GDB scripts if the first
684 If set to "strict", files are sourced according to filename extension.
686 set ada trust-PAD-over-XVS on|off
687 show ada trust-PAD-over-XVS
688 If off, activate a workaround against a bug in the debugging information
689 generated by the compiler for PAD types (see gcc/exp_dbug.ads in
690 the GCC sources for more information about the GNAT encoding and
691 PAD types in particular). It is always safe to set this option to
692 off, but this introduces a slight performance penalty. The default
695 * Python API Improvements
697 ** GDB provides the new class gdb.LazyString. This is useful in
698 some pretty-printing cases. The new method gdb.Value.lazy_string
699 provides a simple way to create objects of this type.
701 ** The fields returned by gdb.Type.fields now have an
702 `is_base_class' attribute.
704 ** The new method gdb.Type.range returns the range of an array type.
706 ** The new method gdb.parse_and_eval can be used to parse and
707 evaluate an expression.
712 Define a trace state variable.
715 Get the current value of a trace state variable.
718 Set desired tracing behavior upon disconnection.
721 Set the trace buffer to be linear or circular.
724 Get data about the tracepoints currently in use.
728 Process record now works correctly with hardware watchpoints.
730 Multiple bug fixes have been made to the mips-irix port, making it
731 much more reliable. In particular:
732 - Debugging threaded applications is now possible again. Previously,
733 GDB would hang while starting the program, or while waiting for
734 the program to stop at a breakpoint.
735 - Attaching to a running process no longer hangs.
736 - An error occurring while loading a core file has been fixed.
737 - Changing the value of the PC register now works again. This fixes
738 problems observed when using the "jump" command, or when calling
739 a function from GDB, or even when assigning a new value to $pc.
740 - With the "finish" and "return" commands, the return value for functions
741 returning a small array is now correctly printed.
742 - It is now possible to break on shared library code which gets executed
743 during a shared library init phase (code executed while executing
744 their .init section). Previously, the breakpoint would have no effect.
745 - GDB is now able to backtrace through the signal handler for
746 non-threaded programs.
748 PIE (Position Independent Executable) programs debugging is now supported.
749 This includes debugging execution of PIC (Position Independent Code) shared
750 libraries although for that, it should be possible to run such libraries as an
753 *** Changes in GDB 7.0
755 * GDB now has an interface for JIT compilation. Applications that
756 dynamically generate code can create symbol files in memory and register
757 them with GDB. For users, the feature should work transparently, and
758 for JIT developers, the interface is documented in the GDB manual in the
759 "JIT Compilation Interface" chapter.
761 * Tracepoints may now be conditional. The syntax is as for
762 breakpoints; either an "if" clause appended to the "trace" command,
763 or the "condition" command is available. GDB sends the condition to
764 the target for evaluation using the same bytecode format as is used
765 for tracepoint actions.
767 * The disassemble command now supports: an optional /r modifier, print the
768 raw instructions in hex as well as in symbolic form, and an optional /m
769 modifier to print mixed source+assembly.
771 * Process record and replay
773 In a architecture environment that supports ``process record and
774 replay'', ``process record and replay'' target can record a log of
775 the process execution, and replay it with both forward and reverse
778 * Reverse debugging: GDB now has new commands reverse-continue, reverse-
779 step, reverse-next, reverse-finish, reverse-stepi, reverse-nexti, and
780 set execution-direction {forward|reverse}, for targets that support
783 * GDB now supports hardware watchpoints on MIPS/Linux systems. This
784 feature is available with a native GDB running on kernel version
787 * GDB now has support for multi-byte and wide character sets on the
788 target. Strings whose character type is wchar_t, char16_t, or
789 char32_t are now correctly printed. GDB supports wide- and unicode-
790 literals in C, that is, L'x', L"string", u'x', u"string", U'x', and
791 U"string" syntax. And, GDB allows the "%ls" and "%lc" formats in
792 `printf'. This feature requires iconv to work properly; if your
793 system does not have a working iconv, GDB can use GNU libiconv. See
794 the installation instructions for more information.
796 * GDB now supports automatic retrieval of shared library files from
797 remote targets. To use this feature, specify a system root that begins
798 with the `remote:' prefix, either via the `set sysroot' command or via
799 the `--with-sysroot' configure-time option.
801 * "info sharedlibrary" now takes an optional regex of libraries to show,
802 and it now reports if a shared library has no debugging information.
804 * Commands `set debug-file-directory', `set solib-search-path' and `set args'
805 now complete on file names.
807 * When completing in expressions, gdb will attempt to limit
808 completions to allowable structure or union fields, where appropriate.
809 For instance, consider:
811 # struct example { int f1; double f2; };
812 # struct example variable;
815 If the user types TAB at the end of this command line, the available
816 completions will be "f1" and "f2".
818 * Inlined functions are now supported. They show up in backtraces, and
819 the "step", "next", and "finish" commands handle them automatically.
821 * GDB now supports the token-splicing (##) and stringification (#)
822 operators when expanding macros. It also supports variable-arity
825 * GDB now supports inspecting extra signal information, exported by
826 the new $_siginfo convenience variable. The feature is currently
827 implemented on linux ARM, i386 and amd64.
829 * GDB can now display the VFP floating point registers and NEON vector
830 registers on ARM targets. Both ARM GNU/Linux native GDB and gdbserver
831 can provide these registers (requires Linux 2.6.30 or later). Remote
832 and simulator targets may also provide them.
837 Search memory for a sequence of bytes.
840 Turn off `+'/`-' protocol acknowledgments to permit more efficient
841 operation over reliable transport links. Use of this packet is
842 controlled by the `set remote noack-packet' command.
845 Kill the process with the specified process ID. Use this in preference
846 to `k' when multiprocess protocol extensions are supported.
849 Obtains additional operating system information
853 Read or write additional signal information.
855 * Removed remote protocol undocumented extension
857 An undocumented extension to the remote protocol's `S' stop reply
858 packet that permited the stub to pass a process id was removed.
859 Remote servers should use the `T' stop reply packet instead.
861 * GDB now supports multiple function calling conventions according to the
862 DWARF-2 DW_AT_calling_convention function attribute.
864 * The SH target utilizes the aforementioned change to distinguish between gcc
865 and Renesas calling convention. It also adds the new CLI commands
866 `set/show sh calling-convention'.
868 * GDB can now read compressed debug sections, as produced by GNU gold
869 with the --compress-debug-sections=zlib flag.
871 * 64-bit core files are now supported on AIX.
873 * Thread switching is now supported on Tru64.
875 * Watchpoints can now be set on unreadable memory locations, e.g. addresses
876 which will be allocated using malloc later in program execution.
878 * The qXfer:libraries:read remote procotol packet now allows passing a
879 list of section offsets.
881 * On GNU/Linux, GDB can now attach to stopped processes. Several race
882 conditions handling signals delivered during attach or thread creation
883 have also been fixed.
885 * GDB now supports the use of DWARF boolean types for Ada's type Boolean.
886 From the user's standpoint, all unqualified instances of True and False
887 are treated as the standard definitions, regardless of context.
889 * GDB now parses C++ symbol and type names more flexibly. For
892 template<typename T> class C { };
895 GDB will now correctly handle all of:
897 ptype C<char const *>
899 ptype C<const char *>
902 * New features in the GDB remote stub, gdbserver
904 - The "--wrapper" command-line argument tells gdbserver to use a
905 wrapper program to launch programs for debugging.
907 - On PowerPC and S/390 targets, it is now possible to use a single
908 gdbserver executable to debug both 32-bit and 64-bit programs.
909 (This requires gdbserver itself to be built as a 64-bit executable.)
911 - gdbserver uses the new noack protocol mode for TCP connections to
912 reduce communications latency, if also supported and enabled in GDB.
914 - Support for the sparc64-linux-gnu target is now included in
917 - The amd64-linux build of gdbserver now supports debugging both
918 32-bit and 64-bit programs.
920 - The i386-linux, amd64-linux, and i386-win32 builds of gdbserver
921 now support hardware watchpoints, and will use them automatically
926 GDB now has support for scripting using Python. Whether this is
927 available is determined at configure time.
929 New GDB commands can now be written in Python.
931 * Ada tasking support
933 Ada tasks can now be inspected in GDB. The following commands have
937 Print the list of Ada tasks.
939 Print detailed information about task number N.
941 Print the task number of the current task.
943 Switch the context of debugging to task number N.
945 * Support for user-defined prefixed commands. The "define" command can
946 add new commands to existing prefixes, e.g. "target".
948 * Multi-inferior, multi-process debugging.
950 GDB now has generalized support for multi-inferior debugging. See
951 "Debugging Multiple Inferiors" in the manual for more information.
952 Although availability still depends on target support, the command
953 set is more uniform now. The GNU/Linux specific multi-forks support
954 has been migrated to this new framework. This implied some user
955 visible changes; see "New commands" and also "Removed commands"
958 * Target descriptions can now describe the target OS ABI. See the
959 "Target Description Format" section in the user manual for more
962 * Target descriptions can now describe "compatible" architectures
963 to indicate that the target can execute applications for a different
964 architecture in addition to those for the main target architecture.
965 See the "Target Description Format" section in the user manual for
968 * Multi-architecture debugging.
970 GDB now includes general supports for debugging applications on
971 hybrid systems that use more than one single processor architecture
972 at the same time. Each such hybrid architecture still requires
973 specific support to be added. The only hybrid architecture supported
974 in this version of GDB is the Cell Broadband Engine.
976 * GDB now supports integrated debugging of Cell/B.E. applications that
977 use both the PPU and SPU architectures. To enable support for hybrid
978 Cell/B.E. debugging, you need to configure GDB to support both the
979 powerpc-linux or powerpc64-linux and the spu-elf targets, using the
980 --enable-targets configure option.
982 * Non-stop mode debugging.
984 For some targets, GDB now supports an optional mode of operation in
985 which you can examine stopped threads while other threads continue
986 to execute freely. This is referred to as non-stop mode, with the
987 old mode referred to as all-stop mode. See the "Non-Stop Mode"
988 section in the user manual for more information.
990 To be able to support remote non-stop debugging, a remote stub needs
991 to implement the non-stop mode remote protocol extensions, as
992 described in the "Remote Non-Stop" section of the user manual. The
993 GDB remote stub, gdbserver, has been adjusted to support these
994 extensions on linux targets.
996 * New commands (for set/show, see "New options" below)
998 catch syscall [NAME(S) | NUMBER(S)]
999 Catch system calls. Arguments, which should be names of system
1000 calls or their numbers, mean catch only those syscalls. Without
1001 arguments, every syscall will be caught. When the inferior issues
1002 any of the specified syscalls, GDB will stop and announce the system
1003 call, both when it is called and when its call returns. This
1004 feature is currently available with a native GDB running on the
1005 Linux Kernel, under the following architectures: x86, x86_64,
1006 PowerPC and PowerPC64.
1008 find [/size-char] [/max-count] start-address, end-address|+search-space-size,
1010 Search memory for a sequence of bytes.
1012 maint set python print-stack
1013 maint show python print-stack
1014 Show a stack trace when an error is encountered in a Python script.
1017 Invoke CODE by passing it to the Python interpreter.
1022 These allow macros to be defined, undefined, and listed
1026 Show operating system information about processes.
1029 List the inferiors currently under GDB's control.
1032 Switch focus to inferior number NUM.
1035 Detach from inferior number NUM.
1038 Kill inferior number NUM.
1042 set spu stop-on-load
1043 show spu stop-on-load
1044 Control whether to stop for new SPE threads during Cell/B.E. debugging.
1046 set spu auto-flush-cache
1047 show spu auto-flush-cache
1048 Control whether to automatically flush the software-managed cache
1049 during Cell/B.E. debugging.
1051 set sh calling-convention
1052 show sh calling-convention
1053 Control the calling convention used when calling SH target functions.
1056 show debug timestamp
1057 Control display of timestamps with GDB debugging output.
1059 set disassemble-next-line
1060 show disassemble-next-line
1061 Control display of disassembled source lines or instructions when
1064 set remote noack-packet
1065 show remote noack-packet
1066 Set/show the use of remote protocol QStartNoAckMode packet. See above
1067 under "New remote packets."
1069 set remote query-attached-packet
1070 show remote query-attached-packet
1071 Control use of remote protocol `qAttached' (query-attached) packet.
1073 set remote read-siginfo-object
1074 show remote read-siginfo-object
1075 Control use of remote protocol `qXfer:siginfo:read' (read-siginfo-object)
1078 set remote write-siginfo-object
1079 show remote write-siginfo-object
1080 Control use of remote protocol `qXfer:siginfo:write' (write-siginfo-object)
1083 set remote reverse-continue
1084 show remote reverse-continue
1085 Control use of remote protocol 'bc' (reverse-continue) packet.
1087 set remote reverse-step
1088 show remote reverse-step
1089 Control use of remote protocol 'bs' (reverse-step) packet.
1091 set displaced-stepping
1092 show displaced-stepping
1093 Control displaced stepping mode. Displaced stepping is a way to
1094 single-step over breakpoints without removing them from the debuggee.
1095 Also known as "out-of-line single-stepping".
1098 show debug displaced
1099 Control display of debugging info for displaced stepping.
1101 maint set internal-error
1102 maint show internal-error
1103 Control what GDB does when an internal error is detected.
1105 maint set internal-warning
1106 maint show internal-warning
1107 Control what GDB does when an internal warning is detected.
1112 Use a wrapper program to launch programs for debugging.
1114 set multiple-symbols (all|ask|cancel)
1115 show multiple-symbols
1116 The value of this variable can be changed to adjust the debugger behavior
1117 when an expression or a breakpoint location contains an ambiguous symbol
1118 name (an overloaded function name, for instance).
1120 set breakpoint always-inserted
1121 show breakpoint always-inserted
1122 Keep breakpoints always inserted in the target, as opposed to inserting
1123 them when resuming the target, and removing them when the target stops.
1124 This option can improve debugger performance on slow remote targets.
1126 set arm fallback-mode (arm|thumb|auto)
1127 show arm fallback-mode
1128 set arm force-mode (arm|thumb|auto)
1130 These commands control how ARM GDB determines whether instructions
1131 are ARM or Thumb. The default for both settings is auto, which uses
1132 the current CPSR value for instructions without symbols; previous
1133 versions of GDB behaved as if "set arm fallback-mode arm".
1135 set disable-randomization
1136 show disable-randomization
1137 Standalone programs run with the virtual address space randomization enabled
1138 by default on some platforms. This option keeps the addresses stable across
1139 multiple debugging sessions.
1143 Control whether other threads are stopped or not when some thread hits
1148 Requests that asynchronous execution is enabled in the target, if available.
1149 In this case, it's possible to resume target in the background, and interact
1150 with GDB while the target is running. "show target-async" displays the
1151 current state of asynchronous execution of the target.
1153 set target-wide-charset
1154 show target-wide-charset
1155 The target-wide-charset is the name of the character set that GDB
1156 uses when printing characters whose type is wchar_t.
1158 set tcp auto-retry (on|off)
1160 set tcp connect-timeout
1161 show tcp connect-timeout
1162 These commands allow GDB to retry failed TCP connections to a remote stub
1163 with a specified timeout period; this is useful if the stub is launched
1164 in parallel with GDB but may not be ready to accept connections immediately.
1166 set libthread-db-search-path
1167 show libthread-db-search-path
1168 Control list of directories which GDB will search for appropriate
1171 set schedule-multiple (on|off)
1172 show schedule-multiple
1173 Allow GDB to resume all threads of all processes or only threads of
1174 the current process.
1178 Use more aggressive caching for accesses to the stack. This improves
1179 performance of remote debugging (particularly backtraces) without
1180 affecting correctness.
1182 set interactive-mode (on|off|auto)
1183 show interactive-mode
1184 Control whether GDB runs in interactive mode (on) or not (off).
1185 When in interactive mode, GDB waits for the user to answer all
1186 queries. Otherwise, GDB does not wait and assumes the default
1187 answer. When set to auto (the default), GDB determines which
1188 mode to use based on the stdin settings.
1193 For program forks, this is replaced by the new more generic `info
1194 inferiors' command. To list checkpoints, you can still use the
1195 `info checkpoints' command, which was an alias for the `info forks'
1199 Replaced by the new `inferior' command. To switch between
1200 checkpoints, you can still use the `restart' command, which was an
1201 alias for the `fork' command.
1204 This is removed, since some targets don't have a notion of
1205 processes. To switch between processes, you can still use the
1206 `inferior' command using GDB's own inferior number.
1209 For program forks, this is replaced by the new more generic `kill
1210 inferior' command. To delete a checkpoint, you can still use the
1211 `delete checkpoint' command, which was an alias for the `delete
1215 For program forks, this is replaced by the new more generic `detach
1216 inferior' command. To detach a checkpoint, you can still use the
1217 `detach checkpoint' command, which was an alias for the `detach
1220 * New native configurations
1222 x86/x86_64 Darwin i[34567]86-*-darwin*
1224 x86_64 MinGW x86_64-*-mingw*
1228 Lattice Mico32 lm32-*
1229 x86 DICOS i[34567]86-*-dicos*
1230 x86_64 DICOS x86_64-*-dicos*
1233 * The GDB remote stub, gdbserver, now supports x86 Windows CE
1234 (mingw32ce) debugging.
1240 These commands were actually not implemented on any target.
1242 *** Changes in GDB 6.8
1244 * New native configurations
1246 NetBSD/hppa hppa*-*netbsd*
1247 Xtensa GNU/Linux xtensa*-*-linux*
1251 NetBSD/hppa hppa*-*-netbsd*
1252 Xtensa GNU/Lunux xtensa*-*-linux*
1254 * Change in command line behavior -- corefiles vs. process ids.
1256 When the '-p NUMBER' or '--pid NUMBER' options are used, and
1257 attaching to process NUMBER fails, GDB no longer attempts to open a
1258 core file named NUMBER. Attaching to a program using the -c option
1259 is no longer supported. Instead, use the '-p' or '--pid' options.
1261 * GDB can now be built as a native debugger for debugging Windows x86
1262 (mingw32) Portable Executable (PE) programs.
1264 * Pending breakpoints no longer change their number when their address
1267 * GDB now supports breakpoints with multiple locations,
1268 including breakpoints on C++ constructors, inside C++ templates,
1269 and in inlined functions.
1271 * GDB's ability to debug optimized code has been improved. GDB more
1272 accurately identifies function bodies and lexical blocks that occupy
1273 more than one contiguous range of addresses.
1275 * Target descriptions can now describe registers for PowerPC.
1277 * The GDB remote stub, gdbserver, now supports the AltiVec and SPE
1278 registers on PowerPC targets.
1280 * The GDB remote stub, gdbserver, now supports thread debugging on GNU/Linux
1281 targets even when the libthread_db library is not available.
1283 * The GDB remote stub, gdbserver, now supports the new file transfer
1284 commands (remote put, remote get, and remote delete).
1286 * The GDB remote stub, gdbserver, now supports run and attach in
1287 extended-remote mode.
1289 * hppa*64*-*-hpux11* target broken
1290 The debugger is unable to start a program and fails with the following
1291 error: "Error trying to get information about dynamic linker".
1292 The gdb-6.7 release is also affected.
1294 * GDB now supports the --enable-targets= configure option to allow
1295 building a single GDB executable that supports multiple remote
1296 target architectures.
1298 * GDB now supports debugging C and C++ programs which use the
1299 Decimal Floating Point extension. In addition, the PowerPC target
1300 now has a set of pseudo-registers to inspect decimal float values
1301 stored in two consecutive float registers.
1303 * The -break-insert MI command can optionally create pending
1306 * Improved support for debugging Ada
1307 Many improvements to the Ada language support have been made. These
1309 - Better support for Ada2005 interface types
1310 - Improved handling of arrays and slices in general
1311 - Better support for Taft-amendment types
1312 - The '{type} ADDRESS' expression is now allowed on the left hand-side
1314 - Improved command completion in Ada
1317 * GDB on GNU/Linux and HP/UX can now debug through "exec" of a new
1322 set print frame-arguments (all|scalars|none)
1323 show print frame-arguments
1324 The value of this variable can be changed to control which argument
1325 values should be printed by the debugger when displaying a frame.
1330 Transfer files to and from a remote target, and delete remote files.
1337 Transfer files to and from a remote target, and delete remote files.
1339 * New remote packets
1346 Open, close, read, write, and delete files on the remote system.
1349 Attach to an existing process on the remote system, in extended-remote
1353 Run a new process on the remote system, in extended-remote mode.
1355 *** Changes in GDB 6.7
1357 * Resolved 101 resource leaks, null pointer dereferences, etc. in gdb,
1358 bfd, libiberty and opcodes, as revealed by static analysis donated by
1359 Coverity, Inc. (http://scan.coverity.com).
1361 * When looking up multiply-defined global symbols, GDB will now prefer the
1362 symbol definition in the current shared library if it was built using the
1363 -Bsymbolic linker option.
1365 * When the Text User Interface (TUI) is not configured, GDB will now
1366 recognize the -tui command-line option and print a message that the TUI
1369 * The GDB remote stub, gdbserver, now has lower overhead for high
1370 frequency signals (e.g. SIGALRM) via the QPassSignals packet.
1372 * GDB for MIPS targets now autodetects whether a remote target provides
1373 32-bit or 64-bit register values.
1375 * Support for C++ member pointers has been improved.
1377 * GDB now understands XML target descriptions, which specify the
1378 target's overall architecture. GDB can read a description from
1379 a local file or over the remote serial protocol.
1381 * Vectors of single-byte data use a new integer type which is not
1382 automatically displayed as character or string data.
1384 * The /s format now works with the print command. It displays
1385 arrays of single-byte integers and pointers to single-byte integers
1388 * Target descriptions can now describe target-specific registers,
1389 for architectures which have implemented the support (currently
1390 only ARM, M68K, and MIPS).
1392 * GDB and the GDB remote stub, gdbserver, now support the XScale
1395 * The GDB remote stub, gdbserver, has been updated to support
1396 ARM Windows CE (mingw32ce) debugging, and GDB Windows CE support
1397 has been rewritten to use the standard GDB remote protocol.
1399 * GDB can now step into C++ functions which are called through thunks.
1401 * GDB for the Cell/B.E. SPU now supports overlay debugging.
1403 * The GDB remote protocol "qOffsets" packet can now honor ELF segment
1404 layout. It also supports a TextSeg= and DataSeg= response when only
1405 segment base addresses (rather than offsets) are available.
1407 * The /i format now outputs any trailing branch delay slot instructions
1408 immediately following the last instruction within the count specified.
1410 * The GDB remote protocol "T" stop reply packet now supports a
1411 "library" response. Combined with the new "qXfer:libraries:read"
1412 packet, this response allows GDB to debug shared libraries on targets
1413 where the operating system manages the list of loaded libraries (e.g.
1414 Windows and SymbianOS).
1416 * The GDB remote stub, gdbserver, now supports dynamic link libraries
1417 (DLLs) on Windows and Windows CE targets.
1419 * GDB now supports a faster verification that a .debug file matches its binary
1420 according to its build-id signature, if the signature is present.
1426 Enable or disable hardware flow control (RTS/CTS) on the serial port
1427 when debugging using remote targets.
1429 set mem inaccessible-by-default
1430 show mem inaccessible-by-default
1431 If the target supplies a memory map, for instance via the remote
1432 protocol's "qXfer:memory-map:read" packet, setting this variable
1433 prevents GDB from accessing memory outside the memory map. This
1434 is useful for targets with memory mapped registers or which react
1435 badly to accesses of unmapped address space.
1437 set breakpoint auto-hw
1438 show breakpoint auto-hw
1439 If the target supplies a memory map, for instance via the remote
1440 protocol's "qXfer:memory-map:read" packet, setting this variable
1441 lets GDB use hardware breakpoints automatically for memory regions
1442 where it can not use software breakpoints. This covers both the
1443 "break" command and internal breakpoints used for other commands
1444 including "next" and "finish".
1447 catch exception unhandled
1448 Stop the program execution when Ada exceptions are raised.
1451 Stop the program execution when an Ada assertion failed.
1455 Set an alternate system root for target files. This is a more
1456 general version of "set solib-absolute-prefix", which is now
1457 an alias to "set sysroot".
1460 Provide extended SPU facility status information. This set of
1461 commands is available only when debugging the Cell/B.E. SPU
1464 * New native configurations
1466 OpenBSD/sh sh*-*openbsd*
1469 unset tdesc filename
1471 Use the specified local file as an XML target description, and do
1472 not query the target for its built-in description.
1476 OpenBSD/sh sh*-*-openbsd*
1477 MIPS64 GNU/Linux (gdbserver) mips64-linux-gnu
1478 Toshiba Media Processor mep-elf
1480 * New remote packets
1483 Ignore the specified signals; pass them directly to the debugged program
1484 without stopping other threads or reporting them to GDB.
1486 qXfer:features:read:
1487 Read an XML target description from the target, which describes its
1492 Read or write contents of an spufs file on the target system. These
1493 packets are available only on the Cell/B.E. SPU architecture.
1495 qXfer:libraries:read:
1496 Report the loaded shared libraries. Combined with new "T" packet
1497 response, this packet allows GDB to debug shared libraries on
1498 targets where the operating system manages the list of loaded
1499 libraries (e.g. Windows and SymbianOS).
1503 Support for these obsolete configurations has been removed.
1511 i[34567]86-*-lynxos*
1512 i[34567]86-*-netware*
1513 i[34567]86-*-sco3.2v5*
1514 i[34567]86-*-sco3.2v4*
1516 i[34567]86-*-sysv4.2*
1519 i[34567]86-*-unixware2*
1520 i[34567]86-*-unixware*
1529 * Other removed features
1536 Various m68k-only ROM monitors.
1543 Various Renesas ROM monitors and debugging interfaces for SH and
1548 Support for a Macraigor serial interface to on-chip debugging.
1549 GDB does not directly support the newer parallel or USB
1554 A debug information format. The predecessor to DWARF 2 and
1555 DWARF 3, which are still supported.
1557 Support for the HP aCC compiler on HP-UX/PA-RISC
1559 SOM-encapsulated symbolic debugging information, automatic
1560 invocation of pxdb, and the aCC custom C++ ABI. This does not
1561 affect HP-UX for Itanium or GCC for HP-UX/PA-RISC. Code compiled
1562 with aCC can still be debugged on an assembly level.
1564 MIPS ".pdr" sections
1566 A MIPS-specific format used to describe stack frame layout
1567 in debugging information.
1571 GDB could work with an older version of Guile to debug
1572 the interpreter and Scheme programs running in it.
1574 set mips stack-arg-size
1575 set mips saved-gpreg-size
1577 Use "set mips abi" to control parameter passing for MIPS.
1579 *** Changes in GDB 6.6
1584 Cell Broadband Engine SPU spu-elf
1586 * GDB can now be configured as a cross-debugger targeting native Windows
1587 (mingw32) or Cygwin. It can communicate with a remote debugging stub
1588 running on a Windows system over TCP/IP to debug Windows programs.
1590 * The GDB remote stub, gdbserver, has been updated to support Windows and
1591 Cygwin debugging. Both single-threaded and multi-threaded programs are
1594 * The "set trust-readonly-sections" command works again. This command was
1595 broken in GDB 6.3, 6.4, and 6.5.
1597 * The "load" command now supports writing to flash memory, if the remote
1598 stub provides the required support.
1600 * Support for GNU/Linux Thread Local Storage (TLS, per-thread variables) no
1601 longer requires symbolic debug information (e.g. DWARF-2).
1606 unset substitute-path
1607 show substitute-path
1608 Manage a list of substitution rules that GDB uses to rewrite the name
1609 of the directories where the sources are located. This can be useful
1610 for instance when the sources were moved to a different location
1611 between compilation and debugging.
1615 Print each CLI command as it is executed. Each command is prefixed with
1616 a number of `+' symbols representing the nesting depth.
1617 The source command now has a `-v' option to enable the same feature.
1621 The ARM Demon monitor support (RDP protocol, "target rdp").
1623 Kernel Object Display, an embedded debugging feature which only worked with
1624 an obsolete version of Cisco IOS.
1626 The 'set download-write-size' and 'show download-write-size' commands.
1628 * New remote packets
1631 Tell a stub about GDB client features, and request remote target features.
1632 The first feature implemented is PacketSize, which allows the target to
1633 specify the size of packets it can handle - to minimize the number of
1634 packets required and improve performance when connected to a remote
1638 Fetch an OS auxilliary vector from the remote stub. This packet is a
1639 more efficient replacement for qPart:auxv:read.
1641 qXfer:memory-map:read:
1642 Fetch a memory map from the remote stub, including information about
1643 RAM, ROM, and flash memory devices.
1648 Erase and program a flash memory device.
1650 * Removed remote packets
1653 This packet has been replaced by qXfer:auxv:read. Only GDB 6.4 and 6.5
1654 used it, and only gdbserver implemented it.
1656 *** Changes in GDB 6.5
1660 Renesas M32C/M16C m32c-elf
1662 Morpho Technologies ms1 ms1-elf
1666 init-if-undefined Initialize a convenience variable, but
1667 only if it doesn't already have a value.
1669 The following commands are presently only implemented for native GNU/Linux:
1671 checkpoint Save a snapshot of the program state.
1673 restart <n> Return the program state to a
1674 previously saved state.
1676 info checkpoints List currently saved checkpoints.
1678 delete-checkpoint <n> Delete a previously saved checkpoint.
1680 set|show detach-on-fork Tell gdb whether to detach from a newly
1681 forked process, or to keep debugging it.
1683 info forks List forks of the user program that
1684 are available to be debugged.
1686 fork <n> Switch to debugging one of several
1687 forks of the user program that are
1688 available to be debugged.
1690 delete-fork <n> Delete a fork from the list of forks
1691 that are available to be debugged (and
1692 kill the forked process).
1694 detach-fork <n> Delete a fork from the list of forks
1695 that are available to be debugged (and
1696 allow the process to continue).
1700 Morpho Technologies ms2 ms1-elf
1702 * Improved Windows host support
1704 GDB now builds as a cross debugger hosted on i686-mingw32, including
1705 native console support, and remote communications using either
1706 network sockets or serial ports.
1708 * Improved Modula-2 language support
1710 GDB can now print most types in the Modula-2 syntax. This includes:
1711 basic types, set types, record types, enumerated types, range types,
1712 pointer types and ARRAY types. Procedure var parameters are correctly
1713 printed and hexadecimal addresses and character constants are also
1714 written in the Modula-2 syntax. Best results can be obtained by using
1715 GNU Modula-2 together with the -gdwarf-2 command line option.
1719 The ARM rdi-share module.
1721 The Netware NLM debug server.
1723 *** Changes in GDB 6.4
1725 * New native configurations
1727 OpenBSD/arm arm*-*-openbsd*
1728 OpenBSD/mips64 mips64-*-openbsd*
1732 Morpho Technologies ms1 ms1-elf
1734 * New command line options
1736 --batch-silent As for --batch, but totally silent.
1737 --return-child-result The debugger will exist with the same value
1738 the child (debugged) program exited with.
1739 --eval-command COMMAND, -ex COMMAND
1740 Execute a single GDB CLI command. This may be
1741 specified multiple times and in conjunction
1742 with the --command (-x) option.
1744 * Deprecated commands removed
1746 The following commands, that were deprecated in 2000, have been
1750 set|show arm disassembly-flavor set|show arm disassembler
1751 othernames set arm disassembler
1752 set|show remotedebug set|show debug remote
1753 set|show archdebug set|show debug arch
1754 set|show eventdebug set|show debug event
1757 * New BSD user-level threads support
1759 It is now possible to debug programs using the user-level threads
1760 library on OpenBSD and FreeBSD. Currently supported (target)
1763 FreeBSD/amd64 x86_64-*-freebsd*
1764 FreeBSD/i386 i386-*-freebsd*
1765 OpenBSD/i386 i386-*-openbsd*
1767 Note that the new kernel threads libraries introduced in FreeBSD 5.x
1768 are not yet supported.
1770 * New support for Matsushita MN10300 w/sim added
1771 (Work in progress). mn10300-elf.
1773 * REMOVED configurations and files
1775 VxWorks and the XDR protocol *-*-vxworks
1776 Motorola MCORE mcore-*-*
1777 National Semiconductor NS32000 ns32k-*-*
1779 * New "set print array-indexes" command
1781 After turning this setting "on", GDB prints the index of each element
1782 when displaying arrays. The default is "off" to preserve the previous
1785 * VAX floating point support
1787 GDB now supports the not-quite-ieee VAX F and D floating point formats.
1789 * User-defined command support
1791 In addition to using $arg0..$arg9 for argument passing, it is now possible
1792 to use $argc to determine now many arguments have been passed. See the
1793 section on user-defined commands in the user manual for more information.
1795 *** Changes in GDB 6.3:
1797 * New command line option
1799 GDB now accepts -l followed by a number to set the timeout for remote
1802 * GDB works with GCC -feliminate-dwarf2-dups
1804 GDB now supports a more compact representation of DWARF-2 debug
1805 information using DW_FORM_ref_addr references. These are produced
1806 by GCC with the option -feliminate-dwarf2-dups and also by some
1807 proprietary compilers. With GCC, you must use GCC 3.3.4 or later
1808 to use -feliminate-dwarf2-dups.
1810 * Internationalization
1812 When supported by the host system, GDB will be built with
1813 internationalization (libintl). The task of marking up the sources is
1814 continued, we're looking forward to our first translation.
1818 Initial support for debugging programs compiled with the GNAT
1819 implementation of the Ada programming language has been integrated
1820 into GDB. In this release, support is limited to expression evaluation.
1822 * New native configurations
1824 GNU/Linux/m32r m32r-*-linux-gnu
1828 GDB's remote protocol now includes support for the 'p' packet. This
1829 packet is used to fetch individual registers from a remote inferior.
1831 * END-OF-LIFE registers[] compatibility module
1833 GDB's internal register infrastructure has been completely rewritten.
1834 The new infrastructure making possible the implementation of key new
1835 features including 32x64 (e.g., 64-bit amd64 GDB debugging a 32-bit
1838 GDB 6.3 will be the last release to include the the registers[]
1839 compatibility module that allowed out-of-date configurations to
1840 continue to work. This change directly impacts the following
1850 powerpc bdm protocol
1852 Unless there is activity to revive these configurations, they will be
1853 made OBSOLETE in GDB 6.4, and REMOVED from GDB 6.5.
1855 * OBSOLETE configurations and files
1857 Configurations that have been declared obsolete in this release have
1858 been commented out. Unless there is activity to revive these
1859 configurations, the next release of GDB will have their sources
1860 permanently REMOVED.
1869 *** Changes in GDB 6.2.1:
1871 * MIPS `break main; run' gave an heuristic-fence-post warning
1873 When attempting to run even a simple program, a warning about
1874 heuristic-fence-post being hit would be reported. This problem has
1877 * MIPS IRIX 'long double' crashed GDB
1879 When examining a long double variable, GDB would get a segmentation
1880 fault. The crash has been fixed (but GDB 6.2 cannot correctly examine
1881 IRIX long double values).
1885 A bug in the VAX stack code was causing problems with the "next"
1886 command. This problem has been fixed.
1888 *** Changes in GDB 6.2:
1890 * Fix for ``many threads''
1892 On GNU/Linux systems that use the NPTL threads library, a program
1893 rapidly creating and deleting threads would confuse GDB leading to the
1896 ptrace: No such process.
1897 thread_db_get_info: cannot get thread info: generic error
1899 This problem has been fixed.
1901 * "-async" and "-noasync" options removed.
1903 Support for the broken "-noasync" option has been removed (it caused
1906 * New ``start'' command.
1908 This command runs the program until the begining of the main procedure.
1910 * New BSD Kernel Data Access Library (libkvm) interface
1912 Using ``target kvm'' it is now possible to debug kernel core dumps and
1913 live kernel memory images on various FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD
1914 platforms. Currently supported (native-only) configurations are:
1916 FreeBSD/amd64 x86_64-*-freebsd*
1917 FreeBSD/i386 i?86-*-freebsd*
1918 NetBSD/i386 i?86-*-netbsd*
1919 NetBSD/m68k m68*-*-netbsd*
1920 NetBSD/sparc sparc-*-netbsd*
1921 OpenBSD/amd64 x86_64-*-openbsd*
1922 OpenBSD/i386 i?86-*-openbsd*
1923 OpenBSD/m68k m68*-openbsd*
1924 OpenBSD/sparc sparc-*-openbsd*
1926 * Signal trampoline code overhauled
1928 Many generic problems with GDB's signal handling code have been fixed.
1929 These include: backtraces through non-contiguous stacks; recognition
1930 of sa_sigaction signal trampolines; backtrace from a NULL pointer
1931 call; backtrace through a signal trampoline; step into and out of
1932 signal handlers; and single-stepping in the signal trampoline.
1934 Please note that kernel bugs are a limiting factor here. These
1935 features have been shown to work on an s390 GNU/Linux system that
1936 include a 2.6.8-rc1 kernel. Ref PR breakpoints/1702.
1938 * Cygwin support for DWARF 2 added.
1940 * New native configurations
1942 GNU/Linux/hppa hppa*-*-linux*
1943 OpenBSD/hppa hppa*-*-openbsd*
1944 OpenBSD/m68k m68*-*-openbsd*
1945 OpenBSD/m88k m88*-*-openbsd*
1946 OpenBSD/powerpc powerpc-*-openbsd*
1947 NetBSD/vax vax-*-netbsd*
1948 OpenBSD/vax vax-*-openbsd*
1950 * END-OF-LIFE frame compatibility module
1952 GDB's internal frame infrastructure has been completely rewritten.
1953 The new infrastructure making it possible to support key new features
1954 including DWARF 2 Call Frame Information. To aid in the task of
1955 migrating old configurations to this new infrastructure, a
1956 compatibility module, that allowed old configurations to continue to
1957 work, was also included.
1959 GDB 6.2 will be the last release to include this frame compatibility
1960 module. This change directly impacts the following configurations:
1970 Unless there is activity to revive these configurations, they will be
1971 made OBSOLETE in GDB 6.3, and REMOVED from GDB 6.4.
1973 * REMOVED configurations and files
1975 Sun 3, running SunOS 3 m68*-*-sunos3*
1976 Sun 3, running SunOS 4 m68*-*-sunos4*
1977 Sun 2, running SunOS 3 m68000-*-sunos3*
1978 Sun 2, running SunOS 4 m68000-*-sunos4*
1979 Motorola 680x0 running LynxOS m68*-*-lynxos*
1980 AT&T 3b1/Unix pc m68*-att-*
1981 Bull DPX2 (68k, System V release 3) m68*-bull-sysv*
1982 decstation mips-dec-* mips-little-*
1983 riscos mips-*-riscos* mips-*-sysv*
1984 sonymips mips-sony-*
1985 sysv mips*-*-sysv4* (IRIX 5/6 not included)
1987 *** Changes in GDB 6.1.1:
1989 * TUI (Text-mode User Interface) built-in (also included in GDB 6.1)
1991 The TUI (Text-mode User Interface) is now built as part of a default
1992 GDB configuration. It is enabled by either selecting the TUI with the
1993 command line option "-i=tui" or by running the separate "gdbtui"
1994 program. For more information on the TUI, see the manual "Debugging
1997 * Pending breakpoint support (also included in GDB 6.1)
1999 Support has been added to allow you to specify breakpoints in shared
2000 libraries that have not yet been loaded. If a breakpoint location
2001 cannot be found, and the "breakpoint pending" option is set to auto,
2002 GDB queries you if you wish to make the breakpoint pending on a future
2003 shared-library load. If and when GDB resolves the breakpoint symbol,
2004 the pending breakpoint is removed as one or more regular breakpoints
2007 Pending breakpoints are very useful for GCJ Java debugging.
2009 * Fixed ISO-C build problems
2011 The files bfd/elf-bfd.h, gdb/dictionary.c and gdb/types.c contained
2012 non ISO-C code that stopped them being built using a more strict ISO-C
2013 compiler (e.g., IBM's C compiler).
2015 * Fixed build problem on IRIX 5
2017 Due to header problems with <sys/proc.h>, the file gdb/proc-api.c
2018 wasn't able to compile compile on an IRIX 5 system.
2020 * Added execute permission to gdb/gdbserver/configure
2022 The shell script gdb/testsuite/gdb.stabs/configure lacked execute
2023 permission. This bug would cause configure to fail on a number of
2024 systems (Solaris, IRIX). Ref: server/519.
2026 * Fixed build problem on hpux2.0w-hp-hpux11.00 using the HP ANSI C compiler
2028 Older HPUX ANSI C compilers did not accept variable array sizes. somsolib.c
2029 has been updated to use constant array sizes.
2031 * Fixed a panic in the DWARF Call Frame Info code on Solaris 2.7
2033 GCC 3.3.2, on Solaris 2.7, includes the DW_EH_PE_funcrel encoding in
2034 its generated DWARF Call Frame Info. This encoding was causing GDB to
2035 panic, that panic has been fixed. Ref: gdb/1628.
2037 * Fixed a problem when examining parameters in shared library code.
2039 When examining parameters in optimized shared library code generated
2040 by a mainline GCC, GDB would incorrectly report ``Variable "..." is
2041 not available''. GDB now correctly displays the variable's value.
2043 *** Changes in GDB 6.1:
2045 * Removed --with-mmalloc
2047 Support for the mmalloc memory manager has been removed, as it
2048 conflicted with the internal gdb byte cache.
2050 * Changes in AMD64 configurations
2052 The AMD64 target now includes the %cs and %ss registers. As a result
2053 the AMD64 remote protocol has changed; this affects the floating-point
2054 and SSE registers. If you rely on those registers for your debugging,
2055 you should upgrade gdbserver on the remote side.
2057 * Revised SPARC target
2059 The SPARC target has been completely revised, incorporating the
2060 FreeBSD/sparc64 support that was added for GDB 6.0. As a result
2061 support for LynxOS and SunOS 4 has been dropped. Calling functions
2062 from within GDB on operating systems with a non-executable stack
2063 (Solaris, OpenBSD) now works.
2067 GDB has a new C++ demangler which does a better job on the mangled
2068 names generated by current versions of g++. It also runs faster, so
2069 with this and other changes gdb should now start faster on large C++
2072 * DWARF 2 Location Expressions
2074 GDB support for location expressions has been extended to support function
2075 arguments and frame bases. Older versions of GDB could crash when they
2078 * C++ nested types and namespaces
2080 GDB's support for nested types and namespaces in C++ has been
2081 improved, especially if you use the DWARF 2 debugging format. (This
2082 is the default for recent versions of GCC on most platforms.)
2083 Specifically, if you have a class "Inner" defined within a class or
2084 namespace "Outer", then GDB realizes that the class's name is
2085 "Outer::Inner", not simply "Inner". This should greatly reduce the
2086 frequency of complaints about not finding RTTI symbols. In addition,
2087 if you are stopped at inside of a function defined within a namespace,
2088 GDB modifies its name lookup accordingly.
2090 * New native configurations
2092 NetBSD/amd64 x86_64-*-netbsd*
2093 OpenBSD/amd64 x86_64-*-openbsd*
2094 OpenBSD/alpha alpha*-*-openbsd*
2095 OpenBSD/sparc sparc-*-openbsd*
2096 OpenBSD/sparc64 sparc64-*-openbsd*
2098 * New debugging protocols
2100 M32R with SDI protocol m32r-*-elf*
2102 * "set prompt-escape-char" command deleted.
2104 The command "set prompt-escape-char" has been deleted. This command,
2105 and its very obscure effet on GDB's prompt, was never documented,
2106 tested, nor mentioned in the NEWS file.
2108 * OBSOLETE configurations and files
2110 Configurations that have been declared obsolete in this release have
2111 been commented out. Unless there is activity to revive these
2112 configurations, the next release of GDB will have their sources
2113 permanently REMOVED.
2115 Sun 3, running SunOS 3 m68*-*-sunos3*
2116 Sun 3, running SunOS 4 m68*-*-sunos4*
2117 Sun 2, running SunOS 3 m68000-*-sunos3*
2118 Sun 2, running SunOS 4 m68000-*-sunos4*
2119 Motorola 680x0 running LynxOS m68*-*-lynxos*
2120 AT&T 3b1/Unix pc m68*-att-*
2121 Bull DPX2 (68k, System V release 3) m68*-bull-sysv*
2122 decstation mips-dec-* mips-little-*
2123 riscos mips-*-riscos* mips-*-sysv*
2124 sonymips mips-sony-*
2125 sysv mips*-*-sysv4* (IRIX 5/6 not included)
2127 * REMOVED configurations and files
2129 SGI Irix-4.x mips-sgi-irix4 or iris4
2130 SGI Iris (MIPS) running Irix V3: mips-sgi-irix or iris
2131 Z8000 simulator z8k-zilog-none or z8ksim
2132 Matsushita MN10200 w/simulator mn10200-*-*
2133 H8/500 simulator h8500-hitachi-hms or h8500hms
2134 HP/PA running BSD hppa*-*-bsd*
2135 HP/PA running OSF/1 hppa*-*-osf*
2136 HP/PA Pro target hppa*-*-pro*
2137 PMAX (MIPS) running Mach 3.0 mips*-*-mach3*
2138 386BSD i[3456]86-*-bsd*
2139 Sequent family i[3456]86-sequent-sysv4*
2140 i[3456]86-sequent-sysv*
2141 i[3456]86-sequent-bsd*
2142 SPARC running LynxOS sparc-*-lynxos*
2143 SPARC running SunOS 4 sparc-*-sunos4*
2144 Tsqware Sparclet sparclet-*-*
2145 Fujitsu SPARClite sparclite-fujitsu-none or sparclite
2147 *** Changes in GDB 6.0:
2151 Support for debugging the Objective-C programming language has been
2152 integrated into GDB.
2154 * New backtrace mechanism (includes DWARF 2 Call Frame Information).
2156 DWARF 2's Call Frame Information makes available compiler generated
2157 information that more exactly describes the program's run-time stack.
2158 By using this information, GDB is able to provide more robust stack
2161 The i386, amd64 (nee, x86-64), Alpha, m68hc11, ia64, and m32r targets
2162 have been updated to use a new backtrace mechanism which includes
2163 DWARF 2 CFI support.
2167 GDB's remote protocol has been extended to include support for hosted
2168 file I/O (where the remote target uses GDB's file system). See GDB's
2169 remote protocol documentation for details.
2171 * All targets using the new architecture framework.
2173 All of GDB's targets have been updated to use the new internal
2174 architecture framework. The way is now open for future GDB releases
2175 to include cross-architecture native debugging support (i386 on amd64,
2178 * GNU/Linux's Thread Local Storage (TLS)
2180 GDB now includes support for for the GNU/Linux implementation of
2181 per-thread variables.
2183 * GNU/Linux's Native POSIX Thread Library (NPTL)
2185 GDB's thread code has been updated to work with either the new
2186 GNU/Linux NPTL thread library or the older "LinuxThreads" library.
2188 * Separate debug info.
2190 GDB, in conjunction with BINUTILS, now supports a mechanism for
2191 automatically loading debug information from a separate file. Instead
2192 of shipping full debug and non-debug versions of system libraries,
2193 system integrators can now instead ship just the stripped libraries
2194 and optional debug files.
2196 * DWARF 2 Location Expressions
2198 DWARF 2 Location Expressions allow the compiler to more completely
2199 describe the location of variables (even in optimized code) to the
2202 GDB now includes preliminary support for location expressions (support
2203 for DW_OP_piece is still missing).
2207 A number of long standing bugs that caused GDB to die while starting a
2208 Java application have been fixed. GDB's Java support is now
2209 considered "useable".
2211 * GNU/Linux support for fork, vfork, and exec.
2213 The "catch fork", "catch exec", "catch vfork", and "set follow-fork-mode"
2214 commands are now implemented for GNU/Linux. They require a 2.5.x or later
2217 * GDB supports logging output to a file
2219 There are two new commands, "set logging" and "show logging", which can be
2220 used to capture GDB's output to a file.
2222 * The meaning of "detach" has changed for gdbserver
2224 The "detach" command will now resume the application, as documented. To
2225 disconnect from gdbserver and leave it stopped, use the new "disconnect"
2228 * d10v, m68hc11 `regs' command deprecated
2230 The `info registers' command has been updated so that it displays the
2231 registers using a format identical to the old `regs' command.
2235 A new command, "maint set profile on/off", has been added. This command can
2236 be used to enable or disable profiling while running GDB, to profile a
2237 session or a set of commands. In addition there is a new configure switch,
2238 "--enable-profiling", which will cause GDB to be compiled with profiling
2239 data, for more informative profiling results.
2241 * Default MI syntax changed to "mi2".
2243 The default MI (machine interface) syntax, enabled by the command line
2244 option "-i=mi", has been changed to "mi2". The previous MI syntax,
2245 "mi1", can be enabled by specifying the option "-i=mi1".
2247 Support for the original "mi0" syntax (included in GDB 5.0) has been
2250 Fix for gdb/192: removed extraneous space when displaying frame level.
2251 Fix for gdb/672: update changelist is now output in mi list format.
2252 Fix for gdb/702: a -var-assign that updates the value now shows up
2253 in a subsequent -var-update.
2255 * New native configurations.
2257 FreeBSD/amd64 x86_64-*-freebsd*
2259 * Multi-arched targets.
2261 HP/PA HPUX11 hppa*-*-hpux*
2262 Renesas M32R/D w/simulator m32r-*-elf*
2264 * OBSOLETE configurations and files
2266 Configurations that have been declared obsolete in this release have
2267 been commented out. Unless there is activity to revive these
2268 configurations, the next release of GDB will have their sources
2269 permanently REMOVED.
2271 Z8000 simulator z8k-zilog-none or z8ksim
2272 Matsushita MN10200 w/simulator mn10200-*-*
2273 H8/500 simulator h8500-hitachi-hms or h8500hms
2274 HP/PA running BSD hppa*-*-bsd*
2275 HP/PA running OSF/1 hppa*-*-osf*
2276 HP/PA Pro target hppa*-*-pro*
2277 PMAX (MIPS) running Mach 3.0 mips*-*-mach3*
2278 Sequent family i[3456]86-sequent-sysv4*
2279 i[3456]86-sequent-sysv*
2280 i[3456]86-sequent-bsd*
2281 Tsqware Sparclet sparclet-*-*
2282 Fujitsu SPARClite sparclite-fujitsu-none or sparclite
2284 * REMOVED configurations and files
2287 Motorola Delta 88000 running Sys V m88k-motorola-sysv or delta88
2288 IBM AIX PS/2 i[3456]86-*-aix
2289 i386 running Mach 3.0 i[3456]86-*-mach3*
2290 i386 running Mach i[3456]86-*-mach*
2291 i386 running OSF/1 i[3456]86-*osf1mk*
2292 HP/Apollo 68k Family m68*-apollo*-sysv*,
2294 m68*-hp-bsd*, m68*-hp-hpux*
2295 Argonaut Risc Chip (ARC) arc-*-*
2296 Mitsubishi D30V d30v-*-*
2297 Fujitsu FR30 fr30-*-elf*
2298 OS/9000 i[34]86-*-os9k
2299 I960 with MON960 i960-*-coff
2301 * MIPS $fp behavior changed
2303 The convenience variable $fp, for the MIPS, now consistently returns
2304 the address of the current frame's base. Previously, depending on the
2305 context, $fp could refer to either $sp or the current frame's base
2306 address. See ``8.10 Registers'' in the manual ``Debugging with GDB:
2307 The GNU Source-Level Debugger''.
2309 *** Changes in GDB 5.3:
2311 * GNU/Linux shared library multi-threaded performance improved.
2313 When debugging a multi-threaded application on GNU/Linux, GDB now uses
2314 `/proc', in preference to `ptrace' for memory reads. This may result
2315 in an improvement in the start-up time of multi-threaded, shared
2316 library applications when run under GDB. One GDB user writes: ``loads
2317 shared libs like mad''.
2319 * ``gdbserver'' now supports multi-threaded applications on some targets
2321 Support for debugging multi-threaded applications which use
2322 the GNU/Linux LinuxThreads package has been added for
2323 arm*-*-linux*-gnu*, i[3456]86-*-linux*-gnu*, mips*-*-linux*-gnu*,
2324 powerpc*-*-linux*-gnu*, and sh*-*-linux*-gnu*.
2326 * GDB now supports C/C++ preprocessor macros.
2328 GDB now expands preprocessor macro invocations in C/C++ expressions,
2329 and provides various commands for showing macro definitions and how
2332 The new command `macro expand EXPRESSION' expands any macro
2333 invocations in expression, and shows the result.
2335 The new command `show macro MACRO-NAME' shows the definition of the
2336 macro named MACRO-NAME, and where it was defined.
2338 Most compilers don't include information about macros in the debugging
2339 information by default. In GCC 3.1, for example, you need to compile
2340 your program with the options `-gdwarf-2 -g3'. If the macro
2341 information is present in the executable, GDB will read it.
2343 * Multi-arched targets.
2345 DEC Alpha (partial) alpha*-*-*
2346 DEC VAX (partial) vax-*-*
2348 National Semiconductor NS32000 (partial) ns32k-*-*
2349 Motorola 68000 (partial) m68k-*-*
2350 Motorola MCORE mcore-*-*
2354 Fujitsu FRV architecture added by Red Hat frv*-*-*
2357 * New native configurations
2359 Alpha NetBSD alpha*-*-netbsd*
2360 SH NetBSD sh*-*-netbsdelf*
2361 MIPS NetBSD mips*-*-netbsd*
2362 UltraSPARC NetBSD sparc64-*-netbsd*
2364 * OBSOLETE configurations and files
2366 Configurations that have been declared obsolete in this release have
2367 been commented out. Unless there is activity to revive these
2368 configurations, the next release of GDB will have their sources
2369 permanently REMOVED.
2371 Mitsubishi D30V d30v-*-*
2372 OS/9000 i[34]86-*-os9k
2373 IBM AIX PS/2 i[3456]86-*-aix
2374 Fujitsu FR30 fr30-*-elf*
2375 Motorola Delta 88000 running Sys V m88k-motorola-sysv or delta88
2376 Argonaut Risc Chip (ARC) arc-*-*
2377 i386 running Mach 3.0 i[3456]86-*-mach3*
2378 i386 running Mach i[3456]86-*-mach*
2379 i386 running OSF/1 i[3456]86-*osf1mk*
2380 HP/Apollo 68k Family m68*-apollo*-sysv*,
2382 m68*-hp-bsd*, m68*-hp-hpux*
2383 I960 with MON960 i960-*-coff
2385 * OBSOLETE languages
2387 CHILL, a Pascal like language used by telecommunications companies.
2389 * REMOVED configurations and files
2391 AMD 29k family via UDI a29k-amd-udi, udi29k
2392 A29K VxWorks a29k-*-vxworks
2393 AMD 29000 embedded, using EBMON a29k-none-none
2394 AMD 29000 embedded with COFF a29k-none-coff
2395 AMD 29000 embedded with a.out a29k-none-aout
2397 testsuite/gdb.hp/gdb.threads-hp/ directory
2399 * New command "set max-user-call-depth <nnn>"
2401 This command allows the user to limit the call depth of user-defined
2402 commands. The default is 1024.
2404 * Changes in FreeBSD/i386 native debugging.
2406 Support for the "generate-core-file" has been added.
2408 * New commands "dump", "append", and "restore".
2410 These commands allow data to be copied from target memory
2411 to a bfd-format or binary file (dump and append), and back
2412 from a file into memory (restore).
2414 * Improved "next/step" support on multi-processor Alpha Tru64.
2416 The previous single-step mechanism could cause unpredictable problems,
2417 including the random appearance of SIGSEGV or SIGTRAP signals. The use
2418 of a software single-step mechanism prevents this.
2420 *** Changes in GDB 5.2.1:
2428 gdb/182: gdb/323: gdb/237: On alpha, gdb was reporting:
2429 mdebugread.c:2443: gdb-internal-error: sect_index_data not initialized
2430 Fix, by Joel Brobecker imported from mainline.
2432 gdb/439: gdb/291: On some ELF object files, gdb was reporting:
2433 dwarf2read.c:1072: gdb-internal-error: sect_index_text not initialize
2434 Fix, by Fred Fish, imported from mainline.
2436 Dwarf2 .debug_frame & .eh_frame handler improved in many ways.
2437 Surprisingly enough, it works now.
2438 By Michal Ludvig, imported from mainline.
2440 i386 hardware watchpoint support:
2441 avoid misses on second run for some targets.
2442 By Pierre Muller, imported from mainline.
2444 *** Changes in GDB 5.2:
2446 * New command "set trust-readonly-sections on[off]".
2448 This command is a hint that tells gdb that read-only sections
2449 really are read-only (ie. that their contents will not change).
2450 In this mode, gdb will go to the object file rather than the
2451 target to read memory from read-only sections (such as ".text").
2452 This can be a significant performance improvement on some
2453 (notably embedded) targets.
2455 * New command "generate-core-file" (or "gcore").
2457 This new gdb command allows the user to drop a core file of the child
2458 process state at any time. So far it's been implemented only for
2459 GNU/Linux and Solaris, but should be relatively easily ported to other
2460 hosts. Argument is core file name (defaults to core.<pid>).
2462 * New command line option
2464 GDB now accepts --pid or -p followed by a process id.
2466 * Change in command line behavior -- corefiles vs. process ids.
2468 There is a subtle behavior in the way in which GDB handles
2469 command line arguments. The first non-flag argument is always
2470 a program to debug, but the second non-flag argument may either
2471 be a corefile or a process id. Previously, GDB would attempt to
2472 open the second argument as a corefile, and if that failed, would
2473 issue a superfluous error message and then attempt to attach it as
2474 a process. Now, if the second argument begins with a non-digit,
2475 it will be treated as a corefile. If it begins with a digit,
2476 GDB will attempt to attach it as a process, and if no such process
2477 is found, will then attempt to open it as a corefile.
2479 * Changes in ARM configurations.
2481 Multi-arch support is enabled for all ARM configurations. The ARM/NetBSD
2482 configuration is fully multi-arch.
2484 * New native configurations
2486 ARM NetBSD arm*-*-netbsd*
2487 x86 OpenBSD i[3456]86-*-openbsd*
2488 AMD x86-64 running GNU/Linux x86_64-*-linux-*
2489 Sparc64 running FreeBSD sparc64-*-freebsd*
2493 Sanyo XStormy16 xstormy16-elf
2495 * OBSOLETE configurations and files
2497 Configurations that have been declared obsolete in this release have
2498 been commented out. Unless there is activity to revive these
2499 configurations, the next release of GDB will have their sources
2500 permanently REMOVED.
2502 AMD 29k family via UDI a29k-amd-udi, udi29k
2503 A29K VxWorks a29k-*-vxworks
2504 AMD 29000 embedded, using EBMON a29k-none-none
2505 AMD 29000 embedded with COFF a29k-none-coff
2506 AMD 29000 embedded with a.out a29k-none-aout
2508 testsuite/gdb.hp/gdb.threads-hp/ directory
2510 * REMOVED configurations and files
2512 TI TMS320C80 tic80-*-*
2514 PowerPC Solaris powerpcle-*-solaris*
2515 PowerPC Windows NT powerpcle-*-cygwin32
2516 PowerPC Netware powerpc-*-netware*
2517 Harris/CXUX m88k m88*-harris-cxux*
2518 Most ns32k hosts and targets ns32k-*-mach3* ns32k-umax-*
2519 ns32k-utek-sysv* ns32k-utek-*
2520 SunOS 4.0.Xi on i386 i[3456]86-*-sunos*
2521 Ultracomputer (29K) running Sym1 a29k-nyu-sym1 a29k-*-kern*
2522 Sony NEWS (68K) running NEWSOS 3.x m68*-sony-sysv news
2523 ISI Optimum V (3.05) under 4.3bsd. m68*-isi-*
2524 Apple Macintosh (MPW) host and target N/A host, powerpc-*-macos*
2526 * Changes to command line processing
2528 The new `--args' feature can be used to specify command-line arguments
2529 for the inferior from gdb's command line.
2531 * Changes to key bindings
2533 There is a new `operate-and-get-next' function bound to `C-o'.
2535 *** Changes in GDB 5.1.1
2537 Fix compile problem on DJGPP.
2539 Fix a problem with floating-point registers on the i386 being
2542 Fix to stop GDB crashing on .debug_str debug info.
2544 Numerous documentation fixes.
2546 Numerous testsuite fixes.
2548 *** Changes in GDB 5.1:
2550 * New native configurations
2552 Alpha FreeBSD alpha*-*-freebsd*
2553 x86 FreeBSD 3.x and 4.x i[3456]86*-freebsd[34]*
2554 MIPS GNU/Linux mips*-*-linux*
2555 MIPS SGI Irix 6.x mips*-sgi-irix6*
2556 ia64 AIX ia64-*-aix*
2557 s390 and s390x GNU/Linux {s390,s390x}-*-linux*
2561 Motorola 68HC11 and 68HC12 m68hc11-elf
2563 UltraSparc running GNU/Linux sparc64-*-linux*
2565 * OBSOLETE configurations and files
2567 x86 FreeBSD before 2.2 i[3456]86*-freebsd{1,2.[01]}*,
2568 Harris/CXUX m88k m88*-harris-cxux*
2569 Most ns32k hosts and targets ns32k-*-mach3* ns32k-umax-*
2570 ns32k-utek-sysv* ns32k-utek-*
2571 TI TMS320C80 tic80-*-*
2573 Ultracomputer (29K) running Sym1 a29k-nyu-sym1 a29k-*-kern*
2574 PowerPC Solaris powerpcle-*-solaris*
2575 PowerPC Windows NT powerpcle-*-cygwin32
2576 PowerPC Netware powerpc-*-netware*
2577 SunOS 4.0.Xi on i386 i[3456]86-*-sunos*
2578 Sony NEWS (68K) running NEWSOS 3.x m68*-sony-sysv news
2579 ISI Optimum V (3.05) under 4.3bsd. m68*-isi-*
2580 Apple Macintosh (MPW) host N/A
2582 stuff.c (Program to stuff files into a specially prepared space in kdb)
2583 kdb-start.c (Main loop for the standalone kernel debugger)
2585 Configurations that have been declared obsolete in this release have
2586 been commented out. Unless there is activity to revive these
2587 configurations, the next release of GDB will have their sources
2588 permanently REMOVED.
2590 * REMOVED configurations and files
2592 Altos 3068 m68*-altos-*
2593 Convex c1-*-*, c2-*-*
2595 ARM RISCix arm-*-* (as host)
2599 * GDB has been converted to ISO C.
2601 GDB's source code has been converted to ISO C. In particular, the
2602 sources are fully protoized, and rely on standard headers being
2607 * "info symbol" works on platforms which use COFF, ECOFF, XCOFF, and NLM.
2609 * The MI enabled by default.
2611 The new machine oriented interface (MI) introduced in GDB 5.0 has been
2612 revised and enabled by default. Packages which use GDB as a debugging
2613 engine behind a UI or another front end are encouraged to switch to
2614 using the GDB/MI interface, instead of the old annotations interface
2615 which is now deprecated.
2617 * Support for debugging Pascal programs.
2619 GDB now includes support for debugging Pascal programs. The following
2620 main features are supported:
2622 - Pascal-specific data types such as sets;
2624 - automatic recognition of Pascal sources based on file-name
2627 - Pascal-style display of data types, variables, and functions;
2629 - a Pascal expression parser.
2631 However, some important features are not yet supported.
2633 - Pascal string operations are not supported at all;
2635 - there are some problems with boolean types;
2637 - Pascal type hexadecimal constants are not supported
2638 because they conflict with the internal variables format;
2640 - support for Pascal objects and classes is not full yet;
2642 - unlike Pascal, GDB is case-sensitive for symbol names.
2644 * Changes in completion.
2646 Commands such as `shell', `run' and `set args', which pass arguments
2647 to inferior programs, now complete on file names, similar to what
2648 users expect at the shell prompt.
2650 Commands which accept locations, such as `disassemble', `print',
2651 `breakpoint', `until', etc. now complete on filenames as well as
2652 program symbols. Thus, if you type "break foob TAB", and the source
2653 files linked into the programs include `foobar.c', that file name will
2654 be one of the candidates for completion. However, file names are not
2655 considered for completion after you typed a colon that delimits a file
2656 name from a name of a function in that file, as in "break foo.c:bar".
2658 `set demangle-style' completes on available demangling styles.
2660 * New platform-independent commands:
2662 It is now possible to define a post-hook for a command as well as a
2663 hook that runs before the command. For more details, see the
2664 documentation of `hookpost' in the GDB manual.
2666 * Changes in GNU/Linux native debugging.
2668 Support for debugging multi-threaded programs has been completely
2669 revised for all platforms except m68k and sparc. You can now debug as
2670 many threads as your system allows you to have.
2672 Attach/detach is supported for multi-threaded programs.
2674 Support for SSE registers was added for x86. This doesn't work for
2675 multi-threaded programs though.
2677 * Changes in MIPS configurations.
2679 Multi-arch support is enabled for all MIPS configurations.
2681 GDB can now be built as native debugger on SGI Irix 6.x systems for
2682 debugging n32 executables. (Debugging 64-bit executables is not yet
2685 * Unified support for hardware watchpoints in all x86 configurations.
2687 Most (if not all) native x86 configurations support hardware-assisted
2688 breakpoints and watchpoints in a unified manner. This support
2689 implements debug register sharing between watchpoints, which allows to
2690 put a virtually infinite number of watchpoints on the same address,
2691 and also supports watching regions up to 16 bytes with several debug
2694 The new maintenance command `maintenance show-debug-regs' toggles
2695 debugging print-outs in functions that insert, remove, and test
2696 watchpoints and hardware breakpoints.
2698 * Changes in the DJGPP native configuration.
2700 New command ``info dos sysinfo'' displays assorted information about
2701 the CPU, OS, memory, and DPMI server.
2703 New commands ``info dos gdt'', ``info dos ldt'', and ``info dos idt''
2704 display information about segment descriptors stored in GDT, LDT, and
2707 New commands ``info dos pde'' and ``info dos pte'' display entries
2708 from Page Directory and Page Tables (for now works with CWSDPMI only).
2709 New command ``info dos address-pte'' displays the Page Table entry for
2710 a given linear address.
2712 GDB can now pass command lines longer than 126 characters to the
2713 program being debugged (requires an update to the libdbg.a library
2714 which is part of the DJGPP development kit).
2716 DWARF2 debug info is now supported.
2718 It is now possible to `step' and `next' through calls to `longjmp'.
2720 * Changes in documentation.
2722 All GDB documentation was converted to GFDL, the GNU Free
2723 Documentation License.
2725 Tracepoints-related commands are now fully documented in the GDB
2728 TUI, the Text-mode User Interface, is now documented in the manual.
2730 Tracepoints-related commands are now fully documented in the GDB
2733 The "GDB Internals" manual now has an index. It also includes
2734 documentation of `ui_out' functions, GDB coding standards, x86
2735 hardware watchpoints, and memory region attributes.
2737 * GDB's version number moved to ``version.in''
2739 The Makefile variable VERSION has been replaced by the file
2740 ``version.in''. People creating GDB distributions should update the
2741 contents of this file.
2745 GUD support is now a standard part of the EMACS distribution.
2747 *** Changes in GDB 5.0:
2749 * Improved support for debugging FP programs on x86 targets
2751 Unified and much-improved support for debugging floating-point
2752 programs on all x86 targets. In particular, ``info float'' now
2753 displays the FP registers in the same format on all x86 targets, with
2754 greater level of detail.
2756 * Improvements and bugfixes in hardware-assisted watchpoints
2758 It is now possible to watch array elements, struct members, and
2759 bitfields with hardware-assisted watchpoints. Data-read watchpoints
2760 on x86 targets no longer erroneously trigger when the address is
2763 * Improvements in the native DJGPP version of GDB
2765 The distribution now includes all the scripts and auxiliary files
2766 necessary to build the native DJGPP version on MS-DOS/MS-Windows
2767 machines ``out of the box''.
2769 The DJGPP version can now debug programs that use signals. It is
2770 possible to catch signals that happened in the debuggee, deliver
2771 signals to it, interrupt it with Ctrl-C, etc. (Previously, a signal
2772 would kill the program being debugged.) Programs that hook hardware
2773 interrupts (keyboard, timer, etc.) can also be debugged.
2775 It is now possible to debug DJGPP programs that redirect their
2776 standard handles or switch them to raw (as opposed to cooked) mode, or
2777 even close them. The command ``run < foo > bar'' works as expected,
2778 and ``info terminal'' reports useful information about the debuggee's
2779 terminal, including raw/cooked mode, redirection, etc.
2781 The DJGPP version now uses termios functions for console I/O, which
2782 enables debugging graphics programs. Interrupting GDB with Ctrl-C
2785 DOS-style file names with drive letters are now fully supported by
2788 It is now possible to debug DJGPP programs that switch their working
2789 directory. It is also possible to rerun the debuggee any number of
2790 times without restarting GDB; thus, you can use the same setup,
2791 breakpoints, etc. for many debugging sessions.
2793 * New native configurations
2795 ARM GNU/Linux arm*-*-linux*
2796 PowerPC GNU/Linux powerpc-*-linux*
2800 Motorola MCore mcore-*-*
2801 x86 VxWorks i[3456]86-*-vxworks*
2802 PowerPC VxWorks powerpc-*-vxworks*
2803 TI TMS320C80 tic80-*-*
2805 * OBSOLETE configurations
2807 Altos 3068 m68*-altos-*
2808 Convex c1-*-*, c2-*-*
2810 ARM RISCix arm-*-* (as host)
2813 Configurations that have been declared obsolete will be commented out,
2814 but the code will be left in place. If there is no activity to revive
2815 these configurations before the next release of GDB, the sources will
2816 be permanently REMOVED.
2818 * Gould support removed
2820 Support for the Gould PowerNode and NP1 has been removed.
2822 * New features for SVR4
2824 On SVR4 native platforms (such as Solaris), if you attach to a process
2825 without first loading a symbol file, GDB will now attempt to locate and
2826 load symbols from the running process's executable file.
2828 * Many C++ enhancements
2830 C++ support has been greatly improved. Overload resolution now works properly
2831 in almost all cases. RTTI support is on the way.
2833 * Remote targets can connect to a sub-program
2835 A popen(3) style serial-device has been added. This device starts a
2836 sub-process (such as a stand-alone simulator) and then communicates
2837 with that. The sub-program to run is specified using the syntax
2838 ``|<program> <args>'' vis:
2840 (gdb) set remotedebug 1
2841 (gdb) target extended-remote |mn10300-elf-sim program-args
2843 * MIPS 64 remote protocol
2845 A long standing bug in the mips64 remote protocol where by GDB
2846 expected certain 32 bit registers (ex SR) to be transfered as 32
2847 instead of 64 bits has been fixed.
2849 The command ``set remote-mips64-transfers-32bit-regs on'' has been
2850 added to provide backward compatibility with older versions of GDB.
2852 * ``set remotebinarydownload'' replaced by ``set remote X-packet''
2854 The command ``set remotebinarydownload'' command has been replaced by
2855 ``set remote X-packet''. Other commands in ``set remote'' family
2856 include ``set remote P-packet''.
2858 * Breakpoint commands accept ranges.
2860 The breakpoint commands ``enable'', ``disable'', and ``delete'' now
2861 accept a range of breakpoints, e.g. ``5-7''. The tracepoint command
2862 ``tracepoint passcount'' also accepts a range of tracepoints.
2864 * ``apropos'' command added.
2866 The ``apropos'' command searches through command names and
2867 documentation strings, printing out matches, making it much easier to
2868 try to find a command that does what you are looking for.
2872 A new machine oriented interface (MI) has been added to GDB. This
2873 interface is designed for debug environments running GDB as a separate
2874 process. This is part of the long term libGDB project. See the
2875 "GDB/MI" chapter of the GDB manual for further information. It can be
2876 enabled by configuring with:
2878 .../configure --enable-gdbmi
2880 *** Changes in GDB-4.18:
2882 * New native configurations
2884 HP-UX 10.20 hppa*-*-hpux10.20
2885 HP-UX 11.x hppa*-*-hpux11.0*
2886 M68K GNU/Linux m68*-*-linux*
2890 Fujitsu FR30 fr30-*-elf*
2891 Intel StrongARM strongarm-*-*
2892 Mitsubishi D30V d30v-*-*
2894 * OBSOLETE configurations
2896 Gould PowerNode, NP1 np1-*-*, pn-*-*
2898 Configurations that have been declared obsolete will be commented out,
2899 but the code will be left in place. If there is no activity to revive
2900 these configurations before the next release of GDB, the sources will
2901 be permanently REMOVED.
2905 As a compatibility experiment, GDB's source files buildsym.h and
2906 buildsym.c have been converted to pure standard C, no longer
2907 containing any K&R compatibility code. We believe that all systems in
2908 use today either come with a standard C compiler, or have a GCC port
2909 available. If this is not true, please report the affected
2910 configuration to bug-gdb@gnu.org immediately. See the README file for
2911 information about getting a standard C compiler if you don't have one
2916 GDB now uses readline 2.2.
2918 * set extension-language
2920 You can now control the mapping between filename extensions and source
2921 languages by using the `set extension-language' command. For instance,
2922 you can ask GDB to treat .c files as C++ by saying
2923 set extension-language .c c++
2924 The command `info extensions' lists all of the recognized extensions
2925 and their associated languages.
2927 * Setting processor type for PowerPC and RS/6000
2929 When GDB is configured for a powerpc*-*-* or an rs6000*-*-* target,
2930 you can use the `set processor' command to specify what variant of the
2931 PowerPC family you are debugging. The command
2935 sets the PowerPC/RS6000 variant to NAME. GDB knows about the
2936 following PowerPC and RS6000 variants:
2938 ppc-uisa PowerPC UISA - a PPC processor as viewed by user-level code
2939 rs6000 IBM RS6000 ("POWER") architecture, user-level view
2941 403GC IBM PowerPC 403GC
2942 505 Motorola PowerPC 505
2943 860 Motorola PowerPC 860 or 850
2944 601 Motorola PowerPC 601
2945 602 Motorola PowerPC 602
2946 603 Motorola/IBM PowerPC 603 or 603e
2947 604 Motorola PowerPC 604 or 604e
2948 750 Motorola/IBM PowerPC 750 or 750
2950 At the moment, this command just tells GDB what to name the
2951 special-purpose processor registers. Since almost all the affected
2952 registers are inaccessible to user-level programs, this command is
2953 only useful for remote debugging in its present form.
2957 Thanks to a major code donation from Hewlett-Packard, GDB now has much
2958 more extensive support for HP-UX. Added features include shared
2959 library support, kernel threads and hardware watchpoints for 11.00,
2960 support for HP's ANSI C and C++ compilers, and a compatibility mode
2961 for xdb and dbx commands.
2965 HP's donation includes the new concept of catchpoints, which is a
2966 generalization of the old catch command. On HP-UX, it is now possible
2967 to catch exec, fork, and vfork, as well as library loading.
2969 This means that the existing catch command has changed; its first
2970 argument now specifies the type of catch to be set up. See the
2971 output of "help catch" for a list of catchpoint types.
2973 * Debugging across forks
2975 On HP-UX, you can choose which process to debug when a fork() happens
2980 HP has donated a curses-based terminal user interface (TUI). To get
2981 it, build with --enable-tui. Although this can be enabled for any
2982 configuration, at present it only works for native HP debugging.
2984 * GDB remote protocol additions
2986 A new protocol packet 'X' that writes binary data is now available.
2987 Default behavior is to try 'X', then drop back to 'M' if the stub
2988 fails to respond. The settable variable `remotebinarydownload'
2989 allows explicit control over the use of 'X'.
2991 For 64-bit targets, the memory packets ('M' and 'm') can now contain a
2992 full 64-bit address. The command
2994 set remoteaddresssize 32
2996 can be used to revert to the old behaviour. For existing remote stubs
2997 the change should not be noticed, as the additional address information
3000 In order to assist in debugging stubs, you may use the maintenance
3001 command `packet' to send any text string to the stub. For instance,
3003 maint packet heythere
3005 sends the packet "$heythere#<checksum>". Note that it is very easy to
3006 disrupt a debugging session by sending the wrong packet at the wrong
3009 The compare-sections command allows you to compare section data on the
3010 target to what is in the executable file without uploading or
3011 downloading, by comparing CRC checksums.
3013 * Tracing can collect general expressions
3015 You may now collect general expressions at tracepoints. This requires
3016 further additions to the target-side stub; see tracepoint.c and
3017 doc/agentexpr.texi for further details.
3019 * mask-address variable for Mips
3021 For Mips targets, you may control the zeroing of the upper 32 bits of
3022 a 64-bit address by entering `set mask-address on'. This is mainly
3023 of interest to users of embedded R4xxx and R5xxx processors.
3025 * Higher serial baud rates
3027 GDB's serial code now allows you to specify baud rates 57600, 115200,
3028 230400, and 460800 baud. (Note that your host system may not be able
3029 to achieve all of these rates.)
3033 The i960 configuration now includes an initial implementation of a
3034 builtin simulator, contributed by Jim Wilson.
3037 *** Changes in GDB-4.17:
3039 * New native configurations
3041 Alpha GNU/Linux alpha*-*-linux*
3042 Unixware 2.x i[3456]86-unixware2*
3043 Irix 6.x mips*-sgi-irix6*
3044 PowerPC GNU/Linux powerpc-*-linux*
3045 PowerPC Solaris powerpcle-*-solaris*
3046 Sparc GNU/Linux sparc-*-linux*
3047 Motorola sysV68 R3V7.1 m68k-motorola-sysv
3051 Argonaut Risc Chip (ARC) arc-*-*
3052 Hitachi H8/300S h8300*-*-*
3053 Matsushita MN10200 w/simulator mn10200-*-*
3054 Matsushita MN10300 w/simulator mn10300-*-*
3055 MIPS NEC VR4100 mips64*vr4100*{,el}-*-elf*
3056 MIPS NEC VR5000 mips64*vr5000*{,el}-*-elf*
3057 MIPS Toshiba TX39 mips64*tx39*{,el}-*-elf*
3058 Mitsubishi D10V w/simulator d10v-*-*
3059 Mitsubishi M32R/D w/simulator m32r-*-elf*
3060 Tsqware Sparclet sparclet-*-*
3061 NEC V850 w/simulator v850-*-*
3063 * New debugging protocols
3065 ARM with RDI protocol arm*-*-*
3066 M68K with dBUG monitor m68*-*-{aout,coff,elf}
3067 DDB and LSI variants of PMON protocol mips*-*-*
3068 PowerPC with DINK32 monitor powerpc{,le}-*-eabi
3069 PowerPC with SDS protocol powerpc{,le}-*-eabi
3070 Macraigor OCD (Wiggler) devices powerpc{,le}-*-eabi
3074 All configurations can now understand and use the DWARF 2 debugging
3075 format. The choice is automatic, if the symbol file contains DWARF 2
3080 GDB now includes basic Java language support. This support is
3081 only useful with Java compilers that produce native machine code.
3083 * solib-absolute-prefix and solib-search-path
3085 For SunOS and SVR4 shared libraries, you may now set the prefix for
3086 loading absolute shared library symbol files, and the search path for
3087 locating non-absolute shared library symbol files.
3089 * Live range splitting
3091 GDB can now effectively debug code for which GCC has performed live
3092 range splitting as part of its optimization. See gdb/doc/LRS for
3093 more details on the expected format of the stabs information.
3097 GDB's support for the GNU Hurd, including thread debugging, has been
3098 updated to work with current versions of the Hurd.
3102 GDB's ARM target configuration now handles the ARM7T (Thumb) 16-bit
3103 instruction set. ARM GDB automatically detects when Thumb
3104 instructions are in use, and adjusts disassembly and backtracing
3109 GDB's MIPS target configurations now handle the MIP16 16-bit
3114 GDB now includes support for overlays; if an executable has been
3115 linked such that multiple sections are based at the same address, GDB
3116 will decide which section to use for symbolic info. You can choose to
3117 control the decision manually, using overlay commands, or implement
3118 additional target-side support and use "overlay load-target" to bring
3119 in the overlay mapping. Do "help overlay" for more detail.
3123 The command "info symbol <address>" displays information about
3124 the symbol at the specified address.
3128 The standard remote protocol now includes an extension that allows
3129 asynchronous collection and display of trace data. This requires
3130 extensive support in the target-side debugging stub. Tracing mode
3131 includes a new interaction mode in GDB and new commands: see the
3132 file tracepoint.c for more details.
3136 Configurations for embedded MIPS now include a simulator contributed
3137 by Cygnus Solutions. The simulator supports the instruction sets
3138 of most MIPS variants.
3142 Sparc configurations may now include the ERC32 simulator contributed
3143 by the European Space Agency. The simulator is not built into
3144 Sparc targets by default; configure with --enable-sim to include it.
3148 For target configurations that may include multiple variants of a
3149 basic architecture (such as MIPS and SH), you may now set the
3150 architecture explicitly. "set arch" sets, "info arch" lists
3151 the possible architectures.
3153 *** Changes in GDB-4.16:
3155 * New native configurations
3157 Windows 95, x86 Windows NT i[345]86-*-cygwin32
3158 M68K NetBSD m68k-*-netbsd*
3159 PowerPC AIX 4.x powerpc-*-aix*
3160 PowerPC MacOS powerpc-*-macos*
3161 PowerPC Windows NT powerpcle-*-cygwin32
3162 RS/6000 AIX 4.x rs6000-*-aix4*
3166 ARM with RDP protocol arm-*-*
3167 I960 with MON960 i960-*-coff
3168 MIPS VxWorks mips*-*-vxworks*
3169 MIPS VR4300 with PMON mips64*vr4300{,el}-*-elf*
3170 PowerPC with PPCBUG monitor powerpc{,le}-*-eabi*
3172 Matra Sparclet sparclet-*-*
3176 The powerpc-eabi configuration now includes the PSIM simulator,
3177 contributed by Andrew Cagney, with assistance from Mike Meissner.
3178 PSIM is a very elaborate model of the PowerPC, including not only
3179 basic instruction set execution, but also details of execution unit
3180 performance and I/O hardware. See sim/ppc/README for more details.
3184 GDB now works with Solaris 2.5.
3186 * Windows 95/NT native
3188 GDB will now work as a native debugger on Windows 95 and Windows NT.
3189 To build it from source, you must use the "gnu-win32" environment,
3190 which uses a DLL to emulate enough of Unix to run the GNU tools.
3191 Further information, binaries, and sources are available at
3192 ftp.cygnus.com, under pub/gnu-win32.
3194 * dont-repeat command
3196 If a user-defined command includes the command `dont-repeat', then the
3197 command will not be repeated if the user just types return. This is
3198 useful if the command is time-consuming to run, so that accidental
3199 extra keystrokes don't run the same command many times.
3201 * Send break instead of ^C
3203 The standard remote protocol now includes an option to send a break
3204 rather than a ^C to the target in order to interrupt it. By default,
3205 GDB will send ^C; to send a break, set the variable `remotebreak' to 1.
3207 * Remote protocol timeout
3209 The standard remote protocol includes a new variable `remotetimeout'
3210 that allows you to set the number of seconds before GDB gives up trying
3211 to read from the target. The default value is 2.
3213 * Automatic tracking of dynamic object loading (HPUX and Solaris only)
3215 By default GDB will automatically keep track of objects as they are
3216 loaded and unloaded by the dynamic linker. By using the command `set
3217 stop-on-solib-events 1' you can arrange for GDB to stop the inferior
3218 when shared library events occur, thus allowing you to set breakpoints
3219 in shared libraries which are explicitly loaded by the inferior.
3221 Note this feature does not work on hpux8. On hpux9 you must link
3222 /usr/lib/end.o into your program. This feature should work
3223 automatically on hpux10.
3225 * Irix 5.x hardware watchpoint support
3227 Irix 5 configurations now support the use of hardware watchpoints.
3229 * Mips protocol "SYN garbage limit"
3231 When debugging a Mips target using the `target mips' protocol, you
3232 may set the number of characters that GDB will ignore by setting
3233 the `syn-garbage-limit'. A value of -1 means that GDB will ignore
3234 every character. The default value is 1050.
3236 * Recording and replaying remote debug sessions
3238 If you set `remotelogfile' to the name of a file, gdb will write to it
3239 a recording of a remote debug session. This recording may then be
3240 replayed back to gdb using "gdbreplay". See gdbserver/README for
3241 details. This is useful when you have a problem with GDB while doing
3242 remote debugging; you can make a recording of the session and send it
3243 to someone else, who can then recreate the problem.
3245 * Speedups for remote debugging
3247 GDB includes speedups for downloading and stepping MIPS systems using
3248 the IDT monitor, fast downloads to the Hitachi SH E7000 emulator,
3249 and more efficient S-record downloading.
3251 * Memory use reductions and statistics collection
3253 GDB now uses less memory and reports statistics about memory usage.
3254 Try the `maint print statistics' command, for example.
3256 *** Changes in GDB-4.15:
3258 * Psymtabs for XCOFF
3260 The symbol reader for AIX GDB now uses partial symbol tables. This
3261 can greatly improve startup time, especially for large executables.
3263 * Remote targets use caching
3265 Remote targets now use a data cache to speed up communication with the
3266 remote side. The data cache could lead to incorrect results because
3267 it doesn't know about volatile variables, thus making it impossible to
3268 debug targets which use memory mapped I/O devices. `set remotecache
3269 off' turns the the data cache off.
3271 * Remote targets may have threads
3273 The standard remote protocol now includes support for multiple threads
3274 in the target system, using new protocol commands 'H' and 'T'. See
3275 gdb/remote.c for details.
3279 If GDB is configured with `--enable-netrom', then it will include
3280 support for the NetROM ROM emulator from XLNT Designs. The NetROM
3281 acts as though it is a bank of ROM on the target board, but you can
3282 write into it over the network. GDB's support consists only of
3283 support for fast loading into the emulated ROM; to debug, you must use
3284 another protocol, such as standard remote protocol. The usual
3285 sequence is something like
3287 target nrom <netrom-hostname>
3289 target remote <netrom-hostname>:1235
3293 GDB now includes support for the Apple Macintosh, as a host only. It
3294 may be run as either an MPW tool or as a standalone application, and
3295 it can debug through the serial port. All the usual GDB commands are
3296 available, but to the target command, you must supply "serial" as the
3297 device type instead of "/dev/ttyXX". See mpw-README in the main
3298 directory for more information on how to build. The MPW configuration
3299 scripts */mpw-config.in support only a few targets, and only the
3300 mips-idt-ecoff target has been tested.
3304 GDB configuration now uses autoconf. This is not user-visible,
3305 but does simplify configuration and building.
3309 GDB now supports hpux10.
3311 *** Changes in GDB-4.14:
3313 * New native configurations
3315 x86 FreeBSD i[345]86-*-freebsd
3316 x86 NetBSD i[345]86-*-netbsd
3317 NS32k NetBSD ns32k-*-netbsd
3318 Sparc NetBSD sparc-*-netbsd
3322 A29K VxWorks a29k-*-vxworks
3323 HP PA PRO embedded (WinBond W89K & Oki OP50N) hppa*-*-pro*
3324 CPU32 EST-300 emulator m68*-*-est*
3325 PowerPC ELF powerpc-*-elf
3328 * Alpha OSF/1 support for procfs
3330 GDB now supports procfs under OSF/1-2.x and higher, which makes it
3331 possible to attach to running processes. As the mounting of the /proc
3332 filesystem is optional on the Alpha, GDB automatically determines
3333 the availability of /proc during startup. This can lead to problems
3334 if /proc is unmounted after GDB has been started.
3336 * Arguments to user-defined commands
3338 User commands may accept up to 10 arguments separated by whitespace.
3339 Arguments are accessed within the user command via $arg0..$arg9. A
3342 print $arg0 + $arg1 + $arg2
3344 To execute the command use:
3347 Defines the command "adder" which prints the sum of its three arguments.
3348 Note the arguments are text substitutions, so they may reference variables,
3349 use complex expressions, or even perform inferior function calls.
3351 * New `if' and `while' commands
3353 This makes it possible to write more sophisticated user-defined
3354 commands. Both commands take a single argument, which is the
3355 expression to evaluate, and must be followed by the commands to
3356 execute, one per line, if the expression is nonzero, the list being
3357 terminated by the word `end'. The `if' command list may include an
3358 `else' word, which causes the following commands to be executed only
3359 if the expression is zero.
3361 * Fortran source language mode
3363 GDB now includes partial support for Fortran 77. It will recognize
3364 Fortran programs and can evaluate a subset of Fortran expressions, but
3365 variables and functions may not be handled correctly. GDB will work
3366 with G77, but does not yet know much about symbols emitted by other
3369 * Better HPUX support
3371 Most debugging facilities now work on dynamic executables for HPPAs
3372 running hpux9 or later. You can attach to running dynamically linked
3373 processes, but by default the dynamic libraries will be read-only, so
3374 for instance you won't be able to put breakpoints in them. To change
3375 that behavior do the following before running the program:
3381 This will cause the libraries to be mapped private and read-write.
3382 To revert to the normal behavior, do this:
3388 You cannot set breakpoints or examine data in the library until after
3389 the library is loaded if the function/data symbols do not have
3392 GDB can now also read debug symbols produced by the HP C compiler on
3393 HPPAs (sorry, no C++, Fortran or 68k support).
3395 * Target byte order now dynamically selectable
3397 You can choose which byte order to use with a target system, via the
3398 commands "set endian big" and "set endian little", and you can see the
3399 current setting by using "show endian". You can also give the command
3400 "set endian auto", in which case GDB will use the byte order
3401 associated with the executable. Currently, only embedded MIPS
3402 configurations support dynamic selection of target byte order.
3404 * New DOS host serial code
3406 This version uses DPMI interrupts to handle buffered I/O, so you
3407 no longer need to run asynctsr when debugging boards connected to
3410 *** Changes in GDB-4.13:
3412 * New "complete" command
3414 This lists all the possible completions for the rest of the line, if it
3415 were to be given as a command itself. This is intended for use by emacs.
3417 * Trailing space optional in prompt
3419 "set prompt" no longer adds a space for you after the prompt you set. This
3420 allows you to set a prompt which ends in a space or one that does not.
3422 * Breakpoint hit counts
3424 "info break" now displays a count of the number of times the breakpoint
3425 has been hit. This is especially useful in conjunction with "ignore"; you
3426 can ignore a large number of breakpoint hits, look at the breakpoint info
3427 to see how many times the breakpoint was hit, then run again, ignoring one
3428 less than that number, and this will get you quickly to the last hit of
3431 * Ability to stop printing at NULL character
3433 "set print null-stop" will cause GDB to stop printing the characters of
3434 an array when the first NULL is encountered. This is useful when large
3435 arrays actually contain only short strings.
3437 * Shared library breakpoints
3439 In SunOS 4.x, SVR4, and Alpha OSF/1 configurations, you can now set
3440 breakpoints in shared libraries before the executable is run.
3442 * Hardware watchpoints
3444 There is a new hardware breakpoint for the watch command for sparclite
3445 targets. See gdb/sparclite/hw_breakpoint.note.
3447 Hardware watchpoints are also now supported under GNU/Linux.
3451 Annotations have been added. These are for use with graphical interfaces,
3452 and are still experimental. Currently only gdba.el uses these.
3454 * Improved Irix 5 support
3456 GDB now works properly with Irix 5.2.
3458 * Improved HPPA support
3460 GDB now works properly with the latest GCC and GAS.
3462 * New native configurations
3464 Sequent PTX4 i[34]86-sequent-ptx4
3465 HPPA running OSF/1 hppa*-*-osf*
3466 Atari TT running SVR4 m68*-*-sysv4*
3467 RS/6000 LynxOS rs6000-*-lynxos*
3471 OS/9000 i[34]86-*-os9k
3472 MIPS R4000 mips64*{,el}-*-{ecoff,elf}
3475 * Hitachi SH7000 and E7000-PC ICE support
3477 There is now support for communicating with the Hitachi E7000-PC ICE.
3478 This is available automatically when GDB is configured for the SH.
3482 As usual, a variety of small fixes and improvements, both generic
3483 and configuration-specific. See the ChangeLog for more detail.
3485 *** Changes in GDB-4.12:
3487 * Irix 5 is now supported
3491 GDB-4.12 on the HPPA has a number of changes which make it unable
3492 to debug the output from the currently released versions of GCC and
3493 GAS (GCC 2.5.8 and GAS-2.2 or PAGAS-1.36). Until the next major release
3494 of GCC and GAS, versions of these tools designed to work with GDB-4.12
3495 can be retrieved via anonymous ftp from jaguar.cs.utah.edu:/dist.
3498 *** Changes in GDB-4.11:
3500 * User visible changes:
3504 The "set remotedebug" option is now consistent between the mips remote
3505 target, remote targets using the gdb-specific protocol, UDI (AMD's
3506 debug protocol for the 29k) and the 88k bug monitor. It is now an
3507 integer specifying a debug level (normally 0 or 1, but 2 means more
3508 debugging info for the mips target).
3510 * DEC Alpha native support
3512 GDB now works on the DEC Alpha. GCC 2.4.5 does not produce usable
3513 debug info, but GDB works fairly well with the DEC compiler and should
3514 work with a future GCC release. See the README file for a few
3515 Alpha-specific notes.
3517 * Preliminary thread implementation
3519 GDB now has preliminary thread support for both SGI/Irix and LynxOS.
3521 * LynxOS native and target support for 386
3523 This release has been hosted on LynxOS 2.2, and also can be configured
3524 to remotely debug programs running under LynxOS (see gdb/gdbserver/README
3527 * Improvements in C++ mangling/demangling.
3529 This release has much better g++ debugging, specifically in name
3530 mangling/demangling, virtual function calls, print virtual table,
3531 call methods, ...etc.
3533 *** Changes in GDB-4.10:
3535 * User visible changes:
3537 Remote debugging using the GDB-specific (`target remote') protocol now
3538 supports the `load' command. This is only useful if you have some
3539 other way of getting the stub to the target system, and you can put it
3540 somewhere in memory where it won't get clobbered by the download.
3542 Filename completion now works.
3544 When run under emacs mode, the "info line" command now causes the
3545 arrow to point to the line specified. Also, "info line" prints
3546 addresses in symbolic form (as well as hex).
3548 All vxworks based targets now support a user settable option, called
3549 vxworks-timeout. This option represents the number of seconds gdb
3550 should wait for responses to rpc's. You might want to use this if
3551 your vxworks target is, perhaps, a slow software simulator or happens
3552 to be on the far side of a thin network line.
3556 This release contains support for using a DEC alpha as a GDB host for
3557 cross debugging. Native alpha debugging is not supported yet.
3560 *** Changes in GDB-4.9:
3564 This is the first GDB release which is accompanied by a matching testsuite.
3565 The testsuite requires installation of dejagnu, which should be available
3566 via ftp from most sites that carry GNU software.
3570 'Cfront' style demangling has had its name changed to 'ARM' style, to
3571 emphasize that it was written from the specifications in the C++ Annotated
3572 Reference Manual, not necessarily to be compatible with AT&T cfront. Despite
3573 disclaimers, it still generated too much confusion with users attempting to
3574 use gdb with AT&T cfront.
3578 GDB now uses a standard remote interface to a simulator library.
3579 So far, the library contains simulators for the Zilog Z8001/2, the
3580 Hitachi H8/300, H8/500 and Super-H.
3582 * New targets supported
3584 H8/300 simulator h8300-hitachi-hms or h8300hms
3585 H8/500 simulator h8500-hitachi-hms or h8500hms
3586 SH simulator sh-hitachi-hms or sh
3587 Z8000 simulator z8k-zilog-none or z8ksim
3588 IDT MIPS board over serial line mips-idt-ecoff
3590 Cross-debugging to GO32 targets is supported. It requires a custom
3591 version of the i386-stub.c module which is integrated with the
3592 GO32 memory extender.
3594 * New remote protocols
3596 MIPS remote debugging protocol.
3598 * New source languages supported
3600 This version includes preliminary support for Chill, a Pascal like language
3601 used by telecommunications companies. Chill support is also being integrated
3602 into the GNU compiler, but we don't know when it will be publically available.
3605 *** Changes in GDB-4.8:
3607 * HP Precision Architecture supported
3609 GDB now supports HP PA-RISC machines running HPUX. A preliminary
3610 version of this support was available as a set of patches from the
3611 University of Utah. GDB does not support debugging of programs
3612 compiled with the HP compiler, because HP will not document their file
3613 format. Instead, you must use GCC (version 2.3.2 or later) and PA-GAS
3614 (as available from jaguar.cs.utah.edu:/dist/pa-gas.u4.tar.Z).
3616 Many problems in the preliminary version have been fixed.
3618 * Faster and better demangling
3620 We have improved template demangling and fixed numerous bugs in the GNU style
3621 demangler. It can now handle type modifiers such as `static' or `const'. Wide
3622 character types (wchar_t) are now supported. Demangling of each symbol is now
3623 only done once, and is cached when the symbol table for a file is read in.
3624 This results in a small increase in memory usage for C programs, a moderate
3625 increase in memory usage for C++ programs, and a fantastic speedup in
3628 `Cfront' style demangling still doesn't work with AT&T cfront. It was written
3629 from the specifications in the Annotated Reference Manual, which AT&T's
3630 compiler does not actually implement.
3632 * G++ multiple inheritance compiler problem
3634 In the 2.3.2 release of gcc/g++, how the compiler resolves multiple
3635 inheritance lattices was reworked to properly discover ambiguities. We
3636 recently found an example which causes this new algorithm to fail in a
3637 very subtle way, producing bad debug information for those classes.
3638 The file 'gcc.patch' (in this directory) can be applied to gcc to
3639 circumvent the problem. A future GCC release will contain a complete
3642 The previous G++ debug info problem (mentioned below for the gdb-4.7
3643 release) is fixed in gcc version 2.3.2.
3645 * Improved configure script
3647 The `configure' script will now attempt to guess your system type if
3648 you don't supply a host system type. The old scheme of supplying a
3649 host system triplet is preferable over using this. All the magic is
3650 done in the new `config.guess' script. Examine it for details.
3652 We have also brought our configure script much more in line with the FSF's
3653 version. It now supports the --with-xxx options. In particular,
3654 `--with-minimal-bfd' can be used to make the GDB binary image smaller.
3655 The resulting GDB will not be able to read arbitrary object file formats --
3656 only the format ``expected'' to be used on the configured target system.
3657 We hope to make this the default in a future release.
3659 * Documentation improvements
3661 There's new internal documentation on how to modify GDB, and how to
3662 produce clean changes to the code. We implore people to read it
3663 before submitting changes.
3665 The GDB manual uses new, sexy Texinfo conditionals, rather than arcane
3666 M4 macros. The new texinfo.tex is provided in this release. Pre-built
3667 `info' files are also provided. To build `info' files from scratch,
3668 you will need the latest `makeinfo' release, which will be available in
3669 a future texinfo-X.Y release.
3671 *NOTE* The new texinfo.tex can cause old versions of TeX to hang.
3672 We're not sure exactly which versions have this problem, but it has
3673 been seen in 3.0. We highly recommend upgrading to TeX version 3.141
3674 or better. If that isn't possible, there is a patch in
3675 `texinfo/tex3patch' that will modify `texinfo/texinfo.tex' to work
3676 around this problem.
3680 GDB now supports array constants that can be used in expressions typed in by
3681 the user. The syntax is `{element, element, ...}'. Ie: you can now type
3682 `print {1, 2, 3}', and it will build up an array in memory malloc'd in
3685 The new directory `gdb/sparclite' contains a program that demonstrates
3686 how the sparc-stub.c remote stub runs on a Fujitsu SPARClite processor.
3688 * New native hosts supported
3690 HP/PA-RISC under HPUX using GNU tools hppa1.1-hp-hpux
3691 386 CPUs running SCO Unix 3.2v4 i386-unknown-sco3.2v4
3693 * New targets supported
3695 AMD 29k family via UDI a29k-amd-udi or udi29k
3697 * New file formats supported
3699 BFD now supports reading HP/PA-RISC executables (SOM file format?),
3700 HPUX core files, and SCO 3.2v2 core files.
3704 Attaching to processes now works again; thanks for the many bug reports.
3706 We have also stomped on a bunch of core dumps caused by
3707 printf_filtered("%s") problems.
3709 We eliminated a copyright problem on the rpc and ptrace header files
3710 for VxWorks, which was discovered at the last minute during the 4.7
3711 release. You should now be able to build a VxWorks GDB.
3713 You can now interrupt gdb while an attached process is running. This
3714 will cause the attached process to stop, and give control back to GDB.
3716 We fixed problems caused by using too many file descriptors
3717 for reading symbols from object files and libraries. This was
3718 especially a problem for programs that used many (~100) shared
3721 The `step' command now only enters a subroutine if there is line number
3722 information for the subroutine. Otherwise it acts like the `next'
3723 command. Previously, `step' would enter subroutines if there was
3724 any debugging information about the routine. This avoids problems
3725 when using `cc -g1' on MIPS machines.
3727 * Internal improvements
3729 GDB's internal interfaces have been improved to make it easier to support
3730 debugging of multiple languages in the future.
3732 GDB now uses a common structure for symbol information internally.
3733 Minimal symbols (derived from linkage symbols in object files), partial
3734 symbols (from a quick scan of debug information), and full symbols
3735 contain a common subset of information, making it easier to write
3736 shared code that handles any of them.
3738 * New command line options
3740 We now accept --silent as an alias for --quiet.
3744 The memory-mapped-malloc library is now licensed under the GNU Library
3745 General Public License.
3747 *** Changes in GDB-4.7:
3749 * Host/native/target split
3751 GDB has had some major internal surgery to untangle the support for
3752 hosts and remote targets. Now, when you configure GDB for a remote
3753 target, it will no longer load in all of the support for debugging
3754 local programs on the host. When fully completed and tested, this will
3755 ensure that arbitrary host/target combinations are possible.
3757 The primary conceptual shift is to separate the non-portable code in
3758 GDB into three categories. Host specific code is required any time GDB
3759 is compiled on that host, regardless of the target. Target specific
3760 code relates to the peculiarities of the target, but can be compiled on
3761 any host. Native specific code is everything else: it can only be
3762 built when the host and target are the same system. Child process
3763 handling and core file support are two common `native' examples.
3765 GDB's use of /proc for controlling Unix child processes is now cleaner.
3766 It has been split out into a single module under the `target_ops' vector,
3767 plus two native-dependent functions for each system that uses /proc.
3769 * New hosts supported
3771 HP/Apollo 68k (under the BSD domain) m68k-apollo-bsd or apollo68bsd
3772 386 CPUs running various BSD ports i386-unknown-bsd or 386bsd
3773 386 CPUs running SCO Unix i386-unknown-scosysv322 or i386sco
3775 * New targets supported
3777 Fujitsu SPARClite sparclite-fujitsu-none or sparclite
3778 68030 and CPU32 m68030-*-*, m68332-*-*
3780 * New native hosts supported
3782 386 CPUs running various BSD ports i386-unknown-bsd or 386bsd
3783 (386bsd is not well tested yet)
3784 386 CPUs running SCO Unix i386-unknown-scosysv322 or sco
3786 * New file formats supported
3788 BFD now supports COFF files for the Zilog Z8000 microprocessor. It
3789 supports reading of `a.out.adobe' object files, which are an a.out
3790 format extended with minimal information about multiple sections.
3794 `show copying' is the same as the old `info copying'.
3795 `show warranty' is the same as `info warrantee'.
3796 These were renamed for consistency. The old commands continue to work.
3798 `info handle' is a new alias for `info signals'.
3800 You can now define pre-command hooks, which attach arbitrary command
3801 scripts to any command. The commands in the hook will be executed
3802 prior to the user's command. You can also create a hook which will be
3803 executed whenever the program stops. See gdb.texinfo.
3807 We now deal with Cfront style name mangling, and can even extract type
3808 info from mangled symbols. GDB can automatically figure out which
3809 symbol mangling style your C++ compiler uses.
3811 Calling of methods and virtual functions has been improved as well.
3815 The crash that occured when debugging Sun Ansi-C compiled binaries is
3816 fixed. This was due to mishandling of the extra N_SO stabs output
3819 We also finally got Ultrix 4.2 running in house, and fixed core file
3820 support, with help from a dozen people on the net.
3822 John M. Farrell discovered that the reason that single-stepping was so
3823 slow on all of the Mips based platforms (primarily SGI and DEC) was
3824 that we were trying to demangle and lookup a symbol used for internal
3825 purposes on every instruction that was being stepped through. Changing
3826 the name of that symbol so that it couldn't be mistaken for a C++
3827 mangled symbol sped things up a great deal.
3829 Rich Pixley sped up symbol lookups in general by getting much smarter
3830 about when C++ symbol mangling is necessary. This should make symbol
3831 completion (TAB on the command line) much faster. It's not as fast as
3832 we'd like, but it's significantly faster than gdb-4.6.
3836 A new user controllable variable 'call_scratch_address' can
3837 specify the location of a scratch area to be used when GDB
3838 calls a function in the target. This is necessary because the
3839 usual method of putting the scratch area on the stack does not work
3840 in systems that have separate instruction and data spaces.
3842 We integrated changes to support the 29k UDI (Universal Debugger
3843 Interface), but discovered at the last minute that we didn't have all
3844 of the appropriate copyright paperwork. We are working with AMD to
3845 resolve this, and hope to have it available soon.
3849 We have sped up the remote serial line protocol, especially for targets
3850 with lots of registers. It now supports a new `expedited status' ('T')
3851 message which can be used in place of the existing 'S' status message.
3852 This allows the remote stub to send only the registers that GDB
3853 needs to make a quick decision about single-stepping or conditional
3854 breakpoints, eliminating the need to fetch the entire register set for
3855 each instruction being stepped through.
3857 The GDB remote serial protocol now implements a write-through cache for
3858 registers, only re-reading the registers if the target has run.
3860 There is also a new remote serial stub for SPARC processors. You can
3861 find it in gdb-4.7/gdb/sparc-stub.c. This was written to support the
3862 Fujitsu SPARClite processor, but will run on any stand-alone SPARC
3863 processor with a serial port.
3867 Configure.in files have become much easier to read and modify. A new
3868 `table driven' format makes it more obvious what configurations are
3869 supported, and what files each one uses.
3873 There is a new opcodes library which will eventually contain all of the
3874 disassembly routines and opcode tables. At present, it only contains
3875 Sparc and Z8000 routines. This will allow the assembler, debugger, and
3876 disassembler (binutils/objdump) to share these routines.
3878 The libiberty library is now copylefted under the GNU Library General
3879 Public License. This allows more liberal use, and was done so libg++
3880 can use it. This makes no difference to GDB, since the Library License
3881 grants all the rights from the General Public License.
3885 The file gdb-4.7/gdb/doc/stabs.texinfo is a (relatively) complete
3886 reference to the stabs symbol info used by the debugger. It is (as far
3887 as we know) the only published document on this fascinating topic. We
3888 encourage you to read it, compare it to the stabs information on your
3889 system, and send improvements on the document in general (to
3890 bug-gdb@prep.ai.mit.edu).
3892 And, of course, many bugs have been fixed.
3895 *** Changes in GDB-4.6:
3897 * Better support for C++ function names
3899 GDB now accepts as input the "demangled form" of C++ overloaded function
3900 names and member function names, and can do command completion on such names
3901 (using TAB, TAB-TAB, and ESC-?). The names have to be quoted with a pair of
3902 single quotes. Examples are 'func (int, long)' and 'obj::operator==(obj&)'.
3903 Make use of command completion, it is your friend.
3905 GDB also now accepts a variety of C++ mangled symbol formats. They are
3906 the GNU g++ style, the Cfront (ARM) style, and the Lucid (lcc) style.
3907 You can tell GDB which format to use by doing a 'set demangle-style {gnu,
3908 lucid, cfront, auto}'. 'gnu' is the default. Do a 'set demangle-style foo'
3909 for the list of formats.
3911 * G++ symbol mangling problem
3913 Recent versions of gcc have a bug in how they emit debugging information for
3914 C++ methods (when using dbx-style stabs). The file 'gcc.patch' (in this
3915 directory) can be applied to gcc to fix the problem. Alternatively, if you
3916 can't fix gcc, you can #define GCC_MANGLE_BUG when compling gdb/symtab.c. The
3917 usual symptom is difficulty with setting breakpoints on methods. GDB complains
3918 about the method being non-existent. (We believe that version 2.2.2 of GCC has
3921 * New 'maintenance' command
3923 All of the commands related to hacking GDB internals have been moved out of
3924 the main command set, and now live behind the 'maintenance' command. This
3925 can also be abbreviated as 'mt'. The following changes were made:
3927 dump-me -> maintenance dump-me
3928 info all-breakpoints -> maintenance info breakpoints
3929 printmsyms -> maintenance print msyms
3930 printobjfiles -> maintenance print objfiles
3931 printpsyms -> maintenance print psymbols
3932 printsyms -> maintenance print symbols
3934 The following commands are new:
3936 maintenance demangle Call internal GDB demangler routine to
3937 demangle a C++ link name and prints the result.
3938 maintenance print type Print a type chain for a given symbol
3940 * Change to .gdbinit file processing
3942 We now read the $HOME/.gdbinit file before processing the argv arguments
3943 (e.g. reading symbol files or core files). This allows global parameters to
3944 be set, which will apply during the symbol reading. The ./.gdbinit is still
3945 read after argv processing.
3947 * New hosts supported
3949 Solaris-2.0 !!! sparc-sun-solaris2 or sun4sol2
3951 GNU/Linux support i386-unknown-linux or linux
3953 We are also including code to support the HP/PA running BSD and HPUX. This
3954 is almost guaranteed not to work, as we didn't have time to test or build it
3955 for this release. We are including it so that the more adventurous (or
3956 masochistic) of you can play with it. We also had major problems with the
3957 fact that the compiler that we got from HP doesn't support the -g option.
3960 * New targets supported
3962 Hitachi H8/300 h8300-hitachi-hms or h8300hms
3964 * More smarts about finding #include files
3966 GDB now remembers the compilation directory for all include files, and for
3967 all files from which C is generated (like yacc and lex sources). This
3968 greatly improves GDB's ability to find yacc/lex sources, and include files,
3969 especially if you are debugging your program from a directory different from
3970 the one that contains your sources.
3972 We also fixed a bug which caused difficulty with listing and setting
3973 breakpoints in include files which contain C code. (In the past, you had to
3974 try twice in order to list an include file that you hadn't looked at before.)
3976 * Interesting infernals change
3978 GDB now deals with arbitrary numbers of sections, where the symbols for each
3979 section must be relocated relative to that section's landing place in the
3980 target's address space. This work was needed to support ELF with embedded
3981 stabs used by Solaris-2.0.
3983 * Bug fixes (of course!)
3985 There have been loads of fixes for the following things:
3986 mips, rs6000, 29k/udi, m68k, g++, type handling, elf/dwarf, m88k,
3987 i960, stabs, DOS(GO32), procfs, etc...
3989 See the ChangeLog for details.
3991 *** Changes in GDB-4.5:
3993 * New machines supported (host and target)
3995 IBM RS6000 running AIX rs6000-ibm-aix or rs6000
3997 SGI Irix-4.x mips-sgi-irix4 or iris4
3999 * New malloc package
4001 GDB now uses a new memory manager called mmalloc, based on gmalloc.
4002 Mmalloc is capable of handling mutiple heaps of memory. It is also
4003 capable of saving a heap to a file, and then mapping it back in later.
4004 This can be used to greatly speedup the startup of GDB by using a
4005 pre-parsed symbol table which lives in a mmalloc managed heap. For
4006 more details, please read mmalloc/mmalloc.texi.
4010 The 'info proc' command (SVR4 only) has been enhanced quite a bit. See
4011 'help info proc' for details.
4013 * MIPS ecoff symbol table format
4015 The code that reads MIPS symbol table format is now supported on all hosts.
4016 Thanks to MIPS for releasing the sym.h and symconst.h files to make this
4019 * File name changes for MS-DOS
4021 Many files in the config directories have been renamed to make it easier to
4022 support GDB on MS-DOSe systems (which have very restrictive file name
4023 conventions :-( ). MS-DOSe host support (under DJ Delorie's GO32
4024 environment) is close to working but has some remaining problems. Note
4025 that debugging of DOS programs is not supported, due to limitations
4026 in the ``operating system'', but it can be used to host cross-debugging.
4028 * Cross byte order fixes
4030 Many fixes have been made to support cross debugging of Sparc and MIPS
4031 targets from hosts whose byte order differs.
4033 * New -mapped and -readnow options
4035 If memory-mapped files are available on your system through the 'mmap'
4036 system call, you can use the -mapped option on the `file' or
4037 `symbol-file' commands to cause GDB to write the symbols from your
4038 program into a reusable file. If the program you are debugging is
4039 called `/path/fred', the mapped symbol file will be `./fred.syms'.
4040 Future GDB debugging sessions will notice the presence of this file,
4041 and will quickly map in symbol information from it, rather than reading
4042 the symbol table from the executable program. Using the '-mapped'
4043 option in a GDB `file' or `symbol-file' command has the same effect as
4044 starting GDB with the '-mapped' command-line option.
4046 You can cause GDB to read the entire symbol table immediately by using
4047 the '-readnow' option with any of the commands that load symbol table
4048 information (or on the GDB command line). This makes the command
4049 slower, but makes future operations faster.
4051 The -mapped and -readnow options are typically combined in order to
4052 build a `fred.syms' file that contains complete symbol information.
4053 A simple GDB invocation to do nothing but build a `.syms' file for future
4056 gdb -batch -nx -mapped -readnow programname
4058 The `.syms' file is specific to the host machine on which GDB is run.
4059 It holds an exact image of GDB's internal symbol table. It cannot be
4060 shared across multiple host platforms.
4062 * longjmp() handling
4064 GDB is now capable of stepping and nexting over longjmp(), _longjmp(), and
4065 siglongjmp() without losing control. This feature has not yet been ported to
4066 all systems. It currently works on many 386 platforms, all MIPS-based
4067 platforms (SGI, DECstation, etc), and Sun3/4.
4071 Preliminary work has been put in to support the new Solaris OS from Sun. At
4072 this time, it can control and debug processes, but it is not capable of
4077 As always, many many bug fixes. The major areas were with g++, and mipsread.
4078 People using the MIPS-based platforms should experience fewer mysterious
4079 crashes and trashed symbol tables.
4081 *** Changes in GDB-4.4:
4083 * New machines supported (host and target)
4085 SCO Unix on i386 IBM PC clones i386-sco-sysv or i386sco
4087 BSD Reno on Vax vax-dec-bsd
4088 Ultrix on Vax vax-dec-ultrix
4090 * New machines supported (target)
4092 AMD 29000 embedded, using EBMON a29k-none-none
4096 GDB continues to improve its handling of C++. `References' work better.
4097 The demangler has also been improved, and now deals with symbols mangled as
4098 per the Annotated C++ Reference Guide.
4100 GDB also now handles `stabs' symbol information embedded in MIPS
4101 `ecoff' symbol tables. Since the ecoff format was not easily
4102 extensible to handle new languages such as C++, this appeared to be a
4103 good way to put C++ debugging info into MIPS binaries. This option
4104 will be supported in the GNU C compiler, version 2, when it is
4107 * New features for SVR4
4109 GDB now handles SVR4 shared libraries, in the same fashion as SunOS
4110 shared libraries. Debugging dynamically linked programs should present
4111 only minor differences from debugging statically linked programs.
4113 The `info proc' command will print out information about any process
4114 on an SVR4 system (including the one you are debugging). At the moment,
4115 it prints the address mappings of the process.
4117 If you bring up GDB on another SVR4 system, please send mail to
4118 bug-gdb@prep.ai.mit.edu to let us know what changes were reqired (if any).
4120 * Better dynamic linking support in SunOS
4122 Reading symbols from shared libraries which contain debugging symbols
4123 now works properly. However, there remain issues such as automatic
4124 skipping of `transfer vector' code during function calls, which
4125 make it harder to debug code in a shared library, than to debug the
4126 same code linked statically.
4130 GDB is now using the latest `getopt' routines from the FSF. This
4131 version accepts the -- prefix for options with long names. GDB will
4132 continue to accept the old forms (-option and +option) as well.
4133 Various single letter abbreviations for options have been explicity
4134 added to the option table so that they won't get overshadowed in the
4135 future by other options that begin with the same letter.
4139 The `cleanup_undefined_types' bug that many of you noticed has been squashed.
4140 Many assorted bugs have been handled. Many more remain to be handled.
4141 See the various ChangeLog files (primarily in gdb and bfd) for details.
4144 *** Changes in GDB-4.3:
4146 * New machines supported (host and target)
4148 Amiga 3000 running Amix m68k-cbm-svr4 or amix
4149 NCR 3000 386 running SVR4 i386-ncr-svr4 or ncr3000
4150 Motorola Delta 88000 running Sys V m88k-motorola-sysv or delta88
4152 * Almost SCO Unix support
4154 We had hoped to support:
4155 SCO Unix on i386 IBM PC clones i386-sco-sysv or i386sco
4156 (except for core file support), but we discovered very late in the release
4157 that it has problems with process groups that render gdb unusable. Sorry
4158 about that. I encourage people to fix it and post the fixes.
4160 * Preliminary ELF and DWARF support
4162 GDB can read ELF object files on System V Release 4, and can handle
4163 debugging records for C, in DWARF format, in ELF files. This support
4164 is preliminary. If you bring up GDB on another SVR4 system, please
4165 send mail to bug-gdb@prep.ai.mit.edu to let us know what changes were
4170 GDB now uses the latest `readline' library. One user-visible change
4171 is that two tabs will list possible command completions, which previously
4172 required typing M-? (meta-question mark, or ESC ?).
4176 The `stepi' bug that many of you noticed has been squashed.
4177 Many bugs in C++ have been handled. Many more remain to be handled.
4178 See the various ChangeLog files (primarily in gdb and bfd) for details.
4180 * State of the MIPS world (in case you wondered):
4182 GDB can understand the symbol tables emitted by the compilers
4183 supplied by most vendors of MIPS-based machines, including DEC. These
4184 symbol tables are in a format that essentially nobody else uses.
4186 Some versions of gcc come with an assembler post-processor called
4187 mips-tfile. This program is required if you want to do source-level
4188 debugging of gcc-compiled programs. I believe FSF does not ship
4189 mips-tfile with gcc version 1, but it will eventually come with gcc
4192 Debugging of g++ output remains a problem. g++ version 1.xx does not
4193 really support it at all. (If you're lucky, you should be able to get
4194 line numbers and stack traces to work, but no parameters or local
4195 variables.) With some work it should be possible to improve the
4198 When gcc version 2 is released, you will have somewhat better luck.
4199 However, even then you will get confusing results for inheritance and
4202 We will eventually provide full debugging of g++ output on
4203 DECstations. This will probably involve some kind of stabs-in-ecoff
4204 encapulation, but the details have not been worked out yet.
4207 *** Changes in GDB-4.2:
4209 * Improved configuration
4211 Only one copy of `configure' exists now, and it is not self-modifying.
4212 Porting BFD is simpler.
4216 The `step' and `next' commands now only stop at the first instruction
4217 of a source line. This prevents the multiple stops that used to occur
4218 in switch statements, for-loops, etc. `Step' continues to stop if a
4219 function that has debugging information is called within the line.
4223 Lots of small bugs fixed. More remain.
4225 * New host supported (not target)
4227 Intel 386 PC clone running Mach i386-none-mach
4230 *** Changes in GDB-4.1:
4232 * Multiple source language support
4234 GDB now has internal scaffolding to handle several source languages.
4235 It determines the type of each source file from its filename extension,
4236 and will switch expression parsing and number formatting to match the
4237 language of the function in the currently selected stack frame.
4238 You can also specifically set the language to be used, with
4239 `set language c' or `set language modula-2'.
4243 GDB now has preliminary support for the GNU Modula-2 compiler,
4244 currently under development at the State University of New York at
4245 Buffalo. Development of both GDB and the GNU Modula-2 compiler will
4246 continue through the fall of 1991 and into 1992.
4248 Other Modula-2 compilers are currently not supported, and attempting to
4249 debug programs compiled with them will likely result in an error as the
4250 symbol table is read. Feel free to work on it, though!
4252 There are hooks in GDB for strict type checking and range checking,
4253 in the `Modula-2 philosophy', but they do not currently work.
4257 GDB can now write to executable and core files (e.g. patch
4258 a variable's value). You must turn this switch on, specify
4259 the file ("exec foo" or "core foo"), *then* modify it, e.g.
4260 by assigning a new value to a variable. Modifications take
4263 * Automatic SunOS shared library reading
4265 When you run your program, GDB automatically determines where its
4266 shared libraries (if any) have been loaded, and reads their symbols.
4267 The `share' command is no longer needed. This also works when
4268 examining core files.
4272 You can specify the number of lines that the `list' command shows.
4275 * New machines supported (host and target)
4277 SGI Iris (MIPS) running Irix V3: mips-sgi-irix or iris
4278 Sony NEWS (68K) running NEWSOS 3.x: m68k-sony-sysv or news
4279 Ultracomputer (29K) running Sym1: a29k-nyu-sym1 or ultra3
4281 * New hosts supported (not targets)
4283 IBM RT/PC: romp-ibm-aix or rtpc
4285 * New targets supported (not hosts)
4287 AMD 29000 embedded with COFF a29k-none-coff
4288 AMD 29000 embedded with a.out a29k-none-aout
4289 Ultracomputer remote kernel debug a29k-nyu-kern
4291 * New remote interfaces
4297 *** Changes in GDB-4.0:
4301 Wide output is wrapped at good places to make the output more readable.
4303 Gdb now supports cross-debugging from a host machine of one type to a
4304 target machine of another type. Communication with the target system
4305 is over serial lines. The ``target'' command handles connecting to the
4306 remote system; the ``load'' command will download a program into the
4307 remote system. Serial stubs for the m68k and i386 are provided. Gdb
4308 also supports debugging of realtime processes running under VxWorks,
4309 using SunRPC Remote Procedure Calls over TCP/IP to talk to a debugger
4310 stub on the target system.
4312 New CPUs supported include the AMD 29000 and Intel 960.
4314 GDB now reads object files and symbol tables via a ``binary file''
4315 library, which allows a single copy of GDB to debug programs of multiple
4316 object file types such as a.out and coff.
4318 There is now a GDB reference card in "doc/refcard.tex". (Make targets
4319 refcard.dvi and refcard.ps are available to format it).
4322 * Control-Variable user interface simplified
4324 All variables that control the operation of the debugger can be set
4325 by the ``set'' command, and displayed by the ``show'' command.
4327 For example, ``set prompt new-gdb=>'' will change your prompt to new-gdb=>.
4328 ``Show prompt'' produces the response:
4329 Gdb's prompt is new-gdb=>.
4331 What follows are the NEW set commands. The command ``help set'' will
4332 print a complete list of old and new set commands. ``help set FOO''
4333 will give a longer description of the variable FOO. ``show'' will show
4334 all of the variable descriptions and their current settings.
4336 confirm on/off: Enables warning questions for operations that are
4337 hard to recover from, e.g. rerunning the program while
4338 it is already running. Default is ON.
4340 editing on/off: Enables EMACS style command line editing
4341 of input. Previous lines can be recalled with
4342 control-P, the current line can be edited with control-B,
4343 you can search for commands with control-R, etc.
4346 history filename NAME: NAME is where the gdb command history
4347 will be stored. The default is .gdb_history,
4348 or the value of the environment variable
4351 history size N: The size, in commands, of the command history. The
4352 default is 256, or the value of the environment variable
4355 history save on/off: If this value is set to ON, the history file will
4356 be saved after exiting gdb. If set to OFF, the
4357 file will not be saved. The default is OFF.
4359 history expansion on/off: If this value is set to ON, then csh-like
4360 history expansion will be performed on
4361 command line input. The default is OFF.
4363 radix N: Sets the default radix for input and output. It can be set
4364 to 8, 10, or 16. Note that the argument to "radix" is interpreted
4365 in the current radix, so "set radix 10" is always a no-op.
4367 height N: This integer value is the number of lines on a page. Default
4368 is 24, the current `stty rows'' setting, or the ``li#''
4369 setting from the termcap entry matching the environment
4372 width N: This integer value is the number of characters on a line.
4373 Default is 80, the current `stty cols'' setting, or the ``co#''
4374 setting from the termcap entry matching the environment
4377 Note: ``set screensize'' is obsolete. Use ``set height'' and
4378 ``set width'' instead.
4380 print address on/off: Print memory addresses in various command displays,
4381 such as stack traces and structure values. Gdb looks
4382 more ``symbolic'' if you turn this off; it looks more
4383 ``machine level'' with it on. Default is ON.
4385 print array on/off: Prettyprint arrays. New convenient format! Default
4388 print demangle on/off: Print C++ symbols in "source" form if on,
4391 print asm-demangle on/off: Same, for assembler level printouts
4394 print vtbl on/off: Prettyprint C++ virtual function tables. Default is OFF.
4397 * Support for Epoch Environment.
4399 The epoch environment is a version of Emacs v18 with windowing. One
4400 new command, ``inspect'', is identical to ``print'', except that if you
4401 are running in the epoch environment, the value is printed in its own
4405 * Support for Shared Libraries
4407 GDB can now debug programs and core files that use SunOS shared libraries.
4408 Symbols from a shared library cannot be referenced
4409 before the shared library has been linked with the program (this
4410 happens after you type ``run'' and before the function main() is entered).
4411 At any time after this linking (including when examining core files
4412 from dynamically linked programs), gdb reads the symbols from each
4413 shared library when you type the ``sharedlibrary'' command.
4414 It can be abbreviated ``share''.
4416 sharedlibrary REGEXP: Load shared object library symbols for files
4417 matching a unix regular expression. No argument
4418 indicates to load symbols for all shared libraries.
4420 info sharedlibrary: Status of loaded shared libraries.
4425 A watchpoint stops execution of a program whenever the value of an
4426 expression changes. Checking for this slows down execution
4427 tremendously whenever you are in the scope of the expression, but is
4428 quite useful for catching tough ``bit-spreader'' or pointer misuse
4429 problems. Some machines such as the 386 have hardware for doing this
4430 more quickly, and future versions of gdb will use this hardware.
4432 watch EXP: Set a watchpoint (breakpoint) for an expression.
4434 info watchpoints: Information about your watchpoints.
4436 delete N: Deletes watchpoint number N (same as breakpoints).
4437 disable N: Temporarily turns off watchpoint number N (same as breakpoints).
4438 enable N: Re-enables watchpoint number N (same as breakpoints).
4441 * C++ multiple inheritance
4443 When used with a GCC version 2 compiler, GDB supports multiple inheritance
4446 * C++ exception handling
4448 Gdb now supports limited C++ exception handling. Besides the existing
4449 ability to breakpoint on an exception handler, gdb can breakpoint on
4450 the raising of an exception (before the stack is peeled back to the
4453 catch FOO: If there is a FOO exception handler in the dynamic scope,
4454 set a breakpoint to catch exceptions which may be raised there.
4455 Multiple exceptions (``catch foo bar baz'') may be caught.
4457 info catch: Lists all exceptions which may be caught in the
4458 current stack frame.
4461 * Minor command changes
4463 The command ``call func (arg, arg, ...)'' now acts like the print
4464 command, except it does not print or save a value if the function's result
4465 is void. This is similar to dbx usage.
4467 The ``up'' and ``down'' commands now always print the frame they end up
4468 at; ``up-silently'' and `down-silently'' can be used in scripts to change
4469 frames without printing.
4471 * New directory command
4473 'dir' now adds directories to the FRONT of the source search path.
4474 The path starts off empty. Source files that contain debug information
4475 about the directory in which they were compiled can be found even
4476 with an empty path; Sun CC and GCC include this information. If GDB can't
4477 find your source file in the current directory, type "dir .".
4479 * Configuring GDB for compilation
4481 For normal use, type ``./configure host''. See README or gdb.texinfo
4484 GDB now handles cross debugging. If you are remotely debugging between
4485 two different machines, type ``./configure host -target=targ''.
4486 Host is the machine where GDB will run; targ is the machine
4487 where the program that you are debugging will run.