Add basic Python API for convenience variables
[binutils-gdb.git] / gdb / NEWS
1 What has changed in GDB?
2 (Organized release by release)
3
4 *** Changes since GDB 8.1
5
6 * The endianness used with the 'set endian auto' mode in the absence of
7 an executable selected for debugging is now the last endianness chosen
8 either by one of the 'set endian big' and 'set endian little' commands
9 or by inferring from the last executable used, rather than the startup
10 default.
11
12 * The commands 'info variables/functions/types' now show the source line
13 numbers of symbol definitions when available.
14
15 * 'info proc' now works on running processes on FreeBSD systems and core
16 files created on FreeBSD systems.
17
18 * C expressions can now use _Alignof, and C++ expressions can now use
19 alignof.
20
21 * New commands
22
23 set debug fbsd-nat
24 show debug fbsd-nat
25 Control display of debugging info regarding the FreeBSD native target.
26
27 set|show varsize-limit
28 This new setting allows the user to control the maximum size of Ada
29 objects being printed when those objects have a variable type,
30 instead of that maximum size being hardcoded to 65536 bytes.
31
32 set|show record btrace cpu
33 Controls the processor to be used for enabling errata workarounds for
34 branch trace decode.
35
36 * Python API
37
38 ** Type alignment is now exposed via the "align" attribute of a gdb.Type.
39
40 ** The commands attached to a breakpoint can be set by assigning to
41 the breakpoint's "commands" field.
42
43 ** gdb.execute can now execute multi-line gdb commands.
44
45 ** The new functions gdb.convenience_variable and
46 gdb.set_convenience_variable can be used to get and set the value
47 of convenience variables.
48
49 * New targets
50
51 RiscV ELF riscv*-*-elf
52
53 * Removed targets and native configurations
54
55 m88k running OpenBSD m88*-*-openbsd*
56 SH-5/SH64 ELF sh64-*-elf*, SH-5/SH64 support in sh*
57 SH-5/SH64 running GNU/Linux SH-5/SH64 support in sh*-*-linux*
58 SH-5/SH64 running OpenBSD SH-5/SH64 support in sh*-*-openbsd*
59
60 * Aarch64/Linux hardware watchpoints improvements
61
62 Hardware watchpoints on unaligned addresses are now properly
63 supported when running Linux kernel 4.10 or higher: read and access
64 watchpoints are no longer spuriously missed, and all watchpoints
65 lengths between 1 and 8 bytes are supported. On older kernels,
66 watchpoints set on unaligned addresses are no longer missed, with
67 the tradeoff that there is a possibility of false hits being
68 reported.
69
70 *** Changes in GDB 8.1
71
72 * GDB now supports dynamically creating arbitrary register groups specified
73 in XML target descriptions. This allows for finer grain grouping of
74 registers on systems with a large amount of registers.
75
76 * The 'ptype' command now accepts a '/o' flag, which prints the
77 offsets and sizes of fields in a struct, like the pahole(1) tool.
78
79 * New "--readnever" command line option instructs GDB to not read each
80 symbol file's symbolic debug information. This makes startup faster
81 but at the expense of not being able to perform symbolic debugging.
82 This option is intended for use cases where symbolic debugging will
83 not be used, e.g., when you only need to dump the debuggee's core.
84
85 * GDB now uses the GNU MPFR library, if available, to emulate target
86 floating-point arithmetic during expression evaluation when the target
87 uses different floating-point formats than the host. At least version
88 3.1 of GNU MPFR is required.
89
90 * GDB now supports access to the guarded-storage-control registers and the
91 software-based guarded-storage broadcast control registers on IBM z14.
92
93 * On Unix systems, GDB now supports transmitting environment variables
94 that are to be set or unset to GDBserver. These variables will
95 affect the environment to be passed to the remote inferior.
96
97 To inform GDB of environment variables that are to be transmitted to
98 GDBserver, use the "set environment" command. Only user set
99 environment variables are sent to GDBserver.
100
101 To inform GDB of environment variables that are to be unset before
102 the remote inferior is started by the GDBserver, use the "unset
103 environment" command.
104
105 * Completion improvements
106
107 ** GDB can now complete function parameters in linespecs and
108 explicit locations without quoting. When setting breakpoints,
109 quoting around functions names to help with TAB-completion is
110 generally no longer necessary. For example, this now completes
111 correctly:
112
113 (gdb) b function(in[TAB]
114 (gdb) b function(int)
115
116 Related, GDB is no longer confused with completing functions in
117 C++ anonymous namespaces:
118
119 (gdb) b (anon[TAB]
120 (gdb) b (anonymous namespace)::[TAB][TAB]
121 (anonymous namespace)::a_function()
122 (anonymous namespace)::b_function()
123
124 ** GDB now has much improved linespec and explicit locations TAB
125 completion support, that better understands what you're
126 completing and offers better suggestions. For example, GDB no
127 longer offers data symbols as possible completions when you're
128 setting a breakpoint.
129
130 ** GDB now TAB-completes label symbol names.
131
132 ** The "complete" command now mimics TAB completion accurately.
133
134 * New command line options (gcore)
135
136 -a
137 Dump all memory mappings.
138
139 * Breakpoints on C++ functions are now set on all scopes by default
140
141 By default, breakpoints on functions/methods are now interpreted as
142 specifying all functions with the given name ignoring missing
143 leading scopes (namespaces and classes).
144
145 For example, assuming a C++ program with symbols named:
146
147 A::B::func()
148 B::func()
149
150 both commands "break func()" and "break B::func()" set a breakpoint
151 on both symbols.
152
153 You can use the new flag "-qualified" to override this. This makes
154 GDB interpret the specified function name as a complete
155 fully-qualified name instead. For example, using the same C++
156 program, the "break -q B::func" command sets a breakpoint on
157 "B::func", only. A parameter has been added to the Python
158 gdb.Breakpoint constructor to achieve the same result when creating
159 a breakpoint from Python.
160
161 * Breakpoints on functions marked with C++ ABI tags
162
163 GDB can now set breakpoints on functions marked with C++ ABI tags
164 (e.g., [abi:cxx11]). See here for a description of ABI tags:
165 https://developers.redhat.com/blog/2015/02/05/gcc5-and-the-c11-abi/
166
167 Functions with a C++11 abi tag are demangled/displayed like this:
168
169 function[abi:cxx11](int)
170 ^^^^^^^^^^^
171
172 You can now set a breakpoint on such functions simply as if they had
173 no tag, like:
174
175 (gdb) b function(int)
176
177 Or if you need to disambiguate between tags, like:
178
179 (gdb) b function[abi:other_tag](int)
180
181 Tab completion was adjusted accordingly as well.
182
183 * Python Scripting
184
185 ** New events gdb.new_inferior, gdb.inferior_deleted, and
186 gdb.new_thread are emitted. See the manual for further
187 description of these.
188
189 ** A new function, "gdb.rbreak" has been added to the Python API.
190 This function allows the setting of a large number of breakpoints
191 via a regex pattern in Python. See the manual for further details.
192
193 ** Python breakpoints can now accept explicit locations. See the
194 manual for a further description of this feature.
195
196
197 * New features in the GDB remote stub, GDBserver
198
199 ** GDBserver is now able to start inferior processes with a
200 specified initial working directory.
201
202 The user can set the desired working directory to be used from
203 GDB using the new "set cwd" command.
204
205 ** New "--selftest" command line option runs some GDBserver self
206 tests. These self tests are disabled in releases.
207
208 ** On Unix systems, GDBserver now does globbing expansion and variable
209 substitution in inferior command line arguments.
210
211 This is done by starting inferiors using a shell, like GDB does.
212 See "set startup-with-shell" in the user manual for how to disable
213 this from GDB when using "target extended-remote". When using
214 "target remote", you can disable the startup with shell by using the
215 new "--no-startup-with-shell" GDBserver command line option.
216
217 ** On Unix systems, GDBserver now supports receiving environment
218 variables that are to be set or unset from GDB. These variables
219 will affect the environment to be passed to the inferior.
220
221 * When catching an Ada exception raised with a message, GDB now prints
222 the message in the catchpoint hit notification. In GDB/MI mode, that
223 information is provided as an extra field named "exception-message"
224 in the *stopped notification.
225
226 * Trait objects can now be inspected When debugging Rust code. This
227 requires compiler support which will appear in Rust 1.24.
228
229 * New remote packets
230
231 QEnvironmentHexEncoded
232 Inform GDBserver of an environment variable that is to be passed to
233 the inferior when starting it.
234
235 QEnvironmentUnset
236 Inform GDBserver of an environment variable that is to be unset
237 before starting the remote inferior.
238
239 QEnvironmentReset
240 Inform GDBserver that the environment should be reset (i.e.,
241 user-set environment variables should be unset).
242
243 QStartupWithShell
244 Indicates whether the inferior must be started with a shell or not.
245
246 QSetWorkingDir
247 Tell GDBserver that the inferior to be started should use a specific
248 working directory.
249
250 * The "maintenance print c-tdesc" command now takes an optional
251 argument which is the file name of XML target description.
252
253 * The "maintenance selftest" command now takes an optional argument to
254 filter the tests to be run.
255
256 * The "enable", and "disable" commands now accept a range of
257 breakpoint locations, e.g. "enable 1.3-5".
258
259 * New commands
260
261 set|show cwd
262 Set and show the current working directory for the inferior.
263
264 set|show compile-gcc
265 Set and show compilation command used for compiling and injecting code
266 with the 'compile' commands.
267
268 set debug separate-debug-file
269 show debug separate-debug-file
270 Control the display of debug output about separate debug file search.
271
272 set dump-excluded-mappings
273 show dump-excluded-mappings
274 Control whether mappings marked with the VM_DONTDUMP flag should be
275 dumped when generating a core file.
276
277 maint info selftests
278 List the registered selftests.
279
280 starti
281 Start the debugged program stopping at the first instruction.
282
283 set|show debug or1k
284 Control display of debugging messages related to OpenRISC targets.
285
286 set|show print type nested-type-limit
287 Set and show the limit of nesting level for nested types that the
288 type printer will show.
289
290 * TUI Single-Key mode now supports two new shortcut keys: `i' for stepi and
291 `o' for nexti.
292
293 * Safer/improved support for debugging with no debug info
294
295 GDB no longer assumes functions with no debug information return
296 'int'.
297
298 This means that GDB now refuses to call such functions unless you
299 tell it the function's type, by either casting the call to the
300 declared return type, or by casting the function to a function
301 pointer of the right type, and calling that:
302
303 (gdb) p getenv ("PATH")
304 'getenv' has unknown return type; cast the call to its declared return type
305 (gdb) p (char *) getenv ("PATH")
306 $1 = 0x7fffffffe "/usr/local/bin:/"...
307 (gdb) p ((char * (*) (const char *)) getenv) ("PATH")
308 $2 = 0x7fffffffe "/usr/local/bin:/"...
309
310 Similarly, GDB no longer assumes that global variables with no debug
311 info have type 'int', and refuses to print the variable's value
312 unless you tell it the variable's type:
313
314 (gdb) p var
315 'var' has unknown type; cast it to its declared type
316 (gdb) p (float) var
317 $3 = 3.14
318
319 * New native configurations
320
321 FreeBSD/aarch64 aarch64*-*-freebsd*
322 FreeBSD/arm arm*-*-freebsd*
323
324 * New targets
325
326 FreeBSD/aarch64 aarch64*-*-freebsd*
327 FreeBSD/arm arm*-*-freebsd*
328 OpenRISC ELF or1k*-*-elf
329
330 * Removed targets and native configurations
331
332 Solaris 2.0-9 i?86-*-solaris2.[0-9], sparc*-*-solaris2.[0-9]
333
334 *** Changes in GDB 8.0
335
336 * GDB now supports access to the PKU register on GNU/Linux. The register is
337 added by the Memory Protection Keys for Userspace feature which will be
338 available in future Intel CPUs.
339
340 * GDB now supports C++11 rvalue references.
341
342 * Python Scripting
343
344 ** New functions to start, stop and access a running btrace recording.
345 ** Rvalue references are now supported in gdb.Type.
346
347 * GDB now supports recording and replaying rdrand and rdseed Intel 64
348 instructions.
349
350 * Building GDB and GDBserver now requires a C++11 compiler.
351
352 For example, GCC 4.8 or later.
353
354 It is no longer possible to build GDB or GDBserver with a C
355 compiler. The --disable-build-with-cxx configure option has been
356 removed.
357
358 * Building GDB and GDBserver now requires GNU make >= 3.81.
359
360 It is no longer supported to build GDB or GDBserver with another
361 implementation of the make program or an earlier version of GNU make.
362
363 * Native debugging on MS-Windows supports command-line redirection
364
365 Command-line arguments used for starting programs on MS-Windows can
366 now include redirection symbols supported by native Windows shells,
367 such as '<', '>', '>>', '2>&1', etc. This affects GDB commands such
368 as "run", "start", and "set args", as well as the corresponding MI
369 features.
370
371 * Support for thread names on MS-Windows.
372
373 GDB now catches and handles the special exception that programs
374 running on MS-Windows use to assign names to threads in the
375 debugger.
376
377 * Support for Java programs compiled with gcj has been removed.
378
379 * User commands now accept an unlimited number of arguments.
380 Previously, only up to 10 was accepted.
381
382 * The "eval" command now expands user-defined command arguments.
383
384 This makes it easier to process a variable number of arguments:
385
386 define mycommand
387 set $i = 0
388 while $i < $argc
389 eval "print $arg%d", $i
390 set $i = $i + 1
391 end
392 end
393
394 * Target descriptions can now describe registers for sparc32 and sparc64.
395
396 * GDB now supports DWARF version 5 (debug information format).
397 Its .debug_names index is not yet supported.
398
399 * New native configurations
400
401 FreeBSD/mips mips*-*-freebsd
402
403 * New targets
404
405 Synopsys ARC arc*-*-elf32
406 FreeBSD/mips mips*-*-freebsd
407
408 * Removed targets and native configurations
409
410 Alpha running FreeBSD alpha*-*-freebsd*
411 Alpha running GNU/kFreeBSD alpha*-*-kfreebsd*-gnu
412
413 * New commands
414
415 flash-erase
416 Erases all the flash memory regions reported by the target.
417
418 maint print arc arc-instruction address
419 Print internal disassembler information about instruction at a given address.
420
421 * New options
422
423 set disassembler-options
424 show disassembler-options
425 Controls the passing of target specific information to the disassembler.
426 If it is necessary to specify more than one disassembler option then
427 multiple options can be placed together into a comma separated list.
428 The default value is the empty string. Currently, the only supported
429 targets are ARM, PowerPC and S/390.
430
431 * New MI commands
432
433 -target-flash-erase
434 Erases all the flash memory regions reported by the target. This is
435 equivalent to the CLI command flash-erase.
436
437 -file-list-shared-libraries
438 List the shared libraries in the program. This is
439 equivalent to the CLI command "info shared".
440
441 -catch-handlers
442 Catchpoints stopping the program when Ada exceptions are
443 handled. This is equivalent to the CLI command "catch handlers".
444
445 *** Changes in GDB 7.12
446
447 * GDB and GDBserver now build with a C++ compiler by default.
448
449 The --enable-build-with-cxx configure option is now enabled by
450 default. One must now explicitly configure with
451 --disable-build-with-cxx in order to build with a C compiler. This
452 option will be removed in a future release.
453
454 * GDBserver now supports recording btrace without maintaining an active
455 GDB connection.
456
457 * GDB now supports a negative repeat count in the 'x' command to examine
458 memory backward from the given address. For example:
459
460 (gdb) bt
461 #0 Func1 (n=42, p=0x40061c "hogehoge") at main.cpp:4
462 #1 0x400580 in main (argc=1, argv=0x7fffffffe5c8) at main.cpp:8
463 (gdb) x/-5i 0x0000000000400580
464 0x40056a <main(int, char**)+8>: mov %edi,-0x4(%rbp)
465 0x40056d <main(int, char**)+11>: mov %rsi,-0x10(%rbp)
466 0x400571 <main(int, char**)+15>: mov $0x40061c,%esi
467 0x400576 <main(int, char**)+20>: mov $0x2a,%edi
468 0x40057b <main(int, char**)+25>:
469 callq 0x400536 <Func1(int, char const*)>
470
471 * Fortran: Support structures with fields of dynamic types and
472 arrays of dynamic types.
473
474 * The symbol dumping maintenance commands have new syntax.
475 maint print symbols [-pc address] [--] [filename]
476 maint print symbols [-objfile objfile] [-source source] [--] [filename]
477 maint print psymbols [-objfile objfile] [-pc address] [--] [filename]
478 maint print psymbols [-objfile objfile] [-source source] [--] [filename]
479 maint print msymbols [-objfile objfile] [--] [filename]
480
481 * GDB now supports multibit bitfields and enums in target register
482 descriptions.
483
484 * New Python-based convenience function $_as_string(val), which returns
485 the textual representation of a value. This function is especially
486 useful to obtain the text label of an enum value.
487
488 * Intel MPX bound violation handling.
489
490 Segmentation faults caused by a Intel MPX boundary violation
491 now display the kind of violation (upper or lower), the memory
492 address accessed and the memory bounds, along with the usual
493 signal received and code location.
494
495 For example:
496
497 Program received signal SIGSEGV, Segmentation fault
498 Upper bound violation while accessing address 0x7fffffffc3b3
499 Bounds: [lower = 0x7fffffffc390, upper = 0x7fffffffc3a3]
500 0x0000000000400d7c in upper () at i386-mpx-sigsegv.c:68
501
502 * Rust language support.
503 GDB now supports debugging programs written in the Rust programming
504 language. See https://www.rust-lang.org/ for more information about
505 Rust.
506
507 * Support for running interpreters on specified input/output devices
508
509 GDB now supports a new mechanism that allows frontends to provide
510 fully featured GDB console views, as a better alternative to
511 building such views on top of the "-interpreter-exec console"
512 command. See the new "new-ui" command below. With that command,
513 frontends can now start GDB in the traditional command-line mode
514 running in an embedded terminal emulator widget, and create a
515 separate MI interpreter running on a specified i/o device. In this
516 way, GDB handles line editing, history, tab completion, etc. in the
517 console all by itself, and the GUI uses the separate MI interpreter
518 for its own control and synchronization, invisible to the command
519 line.
520
521 * The "catch syscall" command catches groups of related syscalls.
522
523 The "catch syscall" command now supports catching a group of related
524 syscalls using the 'group:' or 'g:' prefix.
525
526 * New commands
527
528 skip -file file
529 skip -gfile file-glob-pattern
530 skip -function function
531 skip -rfunction regular-expression
532 A generalized form of the skip command, with new support for
533 glob-style file names and regular expressions for function names.
534 Additionally, a file spec and a function spec may now be combined.
535
536 maint info line-table REGEXP
537 Display the contents of GDB's internal line table data struture.
538
539 maint selftest
540 Run any GDB unit tests that were compiled in.
541
542 new-ui INTERP TTY
543 Start a new user interface instance running INTERP as interpreter,
544 using the TTY file for input/output.
545
546 * Python Scripting
547
548 ** gdb.Breakpoint objects have a new attribute "pending", which
549 indicates whether the breakpoint is pending.
550 ** Three new breakpoint-related events have been added:
551 gdb.breakpoint_created, gdb.breakpoint_modified, and
552 gdb.breakpoint_deleted.
553
554 signal-event EVENTID
555 Signal ("set") the given MS-Windows event object. This is used in
556 conjunction with the Windows JIT debugging (AeDebug) support, where
557 the OS suspends a crashing process until a debugger can attach to
558 it. Resuming the crashing process, in order to debug it, is done by
559 signalling an event.
560
561 * Support for tracepoints and fast tracepoints on s390-linux and s390x-linux
562 was added in GDBserver, including JIT compiling fast tracepoint's
563 conditional expression bytecode into native code.
564
565 * Support for various remote target protocols and ROM monitors has
566 been removed:
567
568 target m32rsdi Remote M32R debugging over SDI
569 target mips MIPS remote debugging protocol
570 target pmon PMON ROM monitor
571 target ddb NEC's DDB variant of PMON for Vr4300
572 target rockhopper NEC RockHopper variant of PMON
573 target lsi LSI variant of PMO
574
575 * Support for tracepoints and fast tracepoints on powerpc-linux,
576 powerpc64-linux, and powerpc64le-linux was added in GDBserver,
577 including JIT compiling fast tracepoint's conditional expression
578 bytecode into native code.
579
580 * MI async record =record-started now includes the method and format used for
581 recording. For example:
582
583 =record-started,thread-group="i1",method="btrace",format="bts"
584
585 * MI async record =thread-selected now includes the frame field. For example:
586
587 =thread-selected,id="3",frame={level="0",addr="0x00000000004007c0"}
588
589 * New targets
590
591 Andes NDS32 nds32*-*-elf
592
593 *** Changes in GDB 7.11
594
595 * GDB now supports debugging kernel-based threads on FreeBSD.
596
597 * Per-inferior thread numbers
598
599 Thread numbers are now per inferior instead of global. If you're
600 debugging multiple inferiors, GDB displays thread IDs using a
601 qualified INF_NUM.THR_NUM form. For example:
602
603 (gdb) info threads
604 Id Target Id Frame
605 1.1 Thread 0x7ffff7fc2740 (LWP 8155) (running)
606 1.2 Thread 0x7ffff7fc1700 (LWP 8168) (running)
607 * 2.1 Thread 0x7ffff7fc2740 (LWP 8157) (running)
608 2.2 Thread 0x7ffff7fc1700 (LWP 8190) (running)
609
610 As consequence, thread numbers as visible in the $_thread
611 convenience variable and in Python's InferiorThread.num attribute
612 are no longer unique between inferiors.
613
614 GDB now maintains a second thread ID per thread, referred to as the
615 global thread ID, which is the new equivalent of thread numbers in
616 previous releases. See also $_gthread below.
617
618 For backwards compatibility, MI's thread IDs always refer to global
619 IDs.
620
621 * Commands that accept thread IDs now accept the qualified
622 INF_NUM.THR_NUM form as well. For example:
623
624 (gdb) thread 2.1
625 [Switching to thread 2.1 (Thread 0x7ffff7fc2740 (LWP 8157))] (running)
626 (gdb)
627
628 * In commands that accept a list of thread IDs, you can now refer to
629 all threads of an inferior using a star wildcard. GDB accepts
630 "INF_NUM.*", to refer to all threads of inferior INF_NUM, and "*" to
631 refer to all threads of the current inferior. For example, "info
632 threads 2.*".
633
634 * You can use "info threads -gid" to display the global thread ID of
635 all threads.
636
637 * The new convenience variable $_gthread holds the global number of
638 the current thread.
639
640 * The new convenience variable $_inferior holds the number of the
641 current inferior.
642
643 * GDB now displays the ID and name of the thread that hit a breakpoint
644 or received a signal, if your program is multi-threaded. For
645 example:
646
647 Thread 3 "bar" hit Breakpoint 1 at 0x40087a: file program.c, line 20.
648 Thread 1 "main" received signal SIGINT, Interrupt.
649
650 * Record btrace now supports non-stop mode.
651
652 * Support for tracepoints on aarch64-linux was added in GDBserver.
653
654 * The 'record instruction-history' command now indicates speculative execution
655 when using the Intel Processor Trace recording format.
656
657 * GDB now allows users to specify explicit locations, bypassing
658 the linespec parser. This feature is also available to GDB/MI
659 clients.
660
661 * Multi-architecture debugging is supported on AArch64 GNU/Linux.
662 GDB now is able to debug both AArch64 applications and ARM applications
663 at the same time.
664
665 * Support for fast tracepoints on aarch64-linux was added in GDBserver,
666 including JIT compiling fast tracepoint's conditional expression bytecode
667 into native code.
668
669 * GDB now supports displaced stepping on AArch64 GNU/Linux.
670
671 * "info threads", "info inferiors", "info display", "info checkpoints"
672 and "maint info program-spaces" now list the corresponding items in
673 ascending ID order, for consistency with all other "info" commands.
674
675 * In Ada, the overloads selection menu has been enhanced to display the
676 parameter types and the return types for the matching overloaded subprograms.
677
678 * New commands
679
680 maint set target-non-stop (on|off|auto)
681 maint show target-non-stop
682 Control whether GDB targets always operate in non-stop mode even if
683 "set non-stop" is "off". The default is "auto", meaning non-stop
684 mode is enabled if supported by the target.
685
686 maint set bfd-sharing
687 maint show bfd-sharing
688 Control the reuse of bfd objects.
689
690 set debug bfd-cache
691 show debug bfd-cache
692 Control display of debugging info regarding bfd caching.
693
694 set debug fbsd-lwp
695 show debug fbsd-lwp
696 Control display of debugging info regarding FreeBSD threads.
697
698 set remote multiprocess-extensions-packet
699 show remote multiprocess-extensions-packet
700 Set/show the use of the remote protocol multiprocess extensions.
701
702 set remote thread-events
703 show remote thread-events
704 Set/show the use of thread create/exit events.
705
706 set ada print-signatures on|off
707 show ada print-signatures"
708 Control whether parameter types and return types are displayed in overloads
709 selection menus. It is activaled (@code{on}) by default.
710
711 set max-value-size
712 show max-value-size
713 Controls the maximum size of memory, in bytes, that GDB will
714 allocate for value contents. Prevents incorrect programs from
715 causing GDB to allocate overly large buffers. Default is 64k.
716
717 * The "disassemble" command accepts a new modifier: /s.
718 It prints mixed source+disassembly like /m with two differences:
719 - disassembled instructions are now printed in program order, and
720 - and source for all relevant files is now printed.
721 The "/m" option is now considered deprecated: its "source-centric"
722 output hasn't proved useful in practice.
723
724 * The "record instruction-history" command accepts a new modifier: /s.
725 It behaves exactly like /m and prints mixed source+disassembly.
726
727 * The "set scheduler-locking" command supports a new mode "replay".
728 It behaves like "off" in record mode and like "on" in replay mode.
729
730 * Support for various ROM monitors has been removed:
731
732 target dbug dBUG ROM monitor for Motorola ColdFire
733 target picobug Motorola picobug monitor
734 target dink32 DINK32 ROM monitor for PowerPC
735 target m32r Renesas M32R/D ROM monitor
736 target mon2000 mon2000 ROM monitor
737 target ppcbug PPCBUG ROM monitor for PowerPC
738
739 * Support for reading/writing memory and extracting values on architectures
740 whose memory is addressable in units of any integral multiple of 8 bits.
741
742 catch handlers
743 Allows to break when an Ada exception is handled.
744
745 * New remote packets
746
747 exec stop reason
748 Indicates that an exec system call was executed.
749
750 exec-events feature in qSupported
751 The qSupported packet allows GDB to request support for exec
752 events using the new 'gdbfeature' exec-event, and the qSupported
753 response can contain the corresponding 'stubfeature'. Set and
754 show commands can be used to display whether these features are enabled.
755
756 vCtrlC
757 Equivalent to interrupting with the ^C character, but works in
758 non-stop mode.
759
760 thread created stop reason (T05 create:...)
761 Indicates that the thread was just created and is stopped at entry.
762
763 thread exit stop reply (w exitcode;tid)
764 Indicates that the thread has terminated.
765
766 QThreadEvents
767 Enables/disables thread create and exit event reporting. For
768 example, this is used in non-stop mode when GDB stops a set of
769 threads and synchronously waits for the their corresponding stop
770 replies. Without exit events, if one of the threads exits, GDB
771 would hang forever not knowing that it should no longer expect a
772 stop for that same thread.
773
774 N stop reply
775 Indicates that there are no resumed threads left in the target (all
776 threads are stopped). The remote stub reports support for this stop
777 reply to GDB's qSupported query.
778
779 QCatchSyscalls
780 Enables/disables catching syscalls from the inferior process.
781 The remote stub reports support for this packet to GDB's qSupported query.
782
783 syscall_entry stop reason
784 Indicates that a syscall was just called.
785
786 syscall_return stop reason
787 Indicates that a syscall just returned.
788
789 * Extended-remote exec events
790
791 ** GDB now has support for exec events on extended-remote Linux targets.
792 For such targets with Linux kernels 2.5.46 and later, this enables
793 follow-exec-mode and exec catchpoints.
794
795 set remote exec-event-feature-packet
796 show remote exec-event-feature-packet
797 Set/show the use of the remote exec event feature.
798
799 * Thread names in remote protocol
800
801 The reply to qXfer:threads:read may now include a name attribute for each
802 thread.
803
804 * Target remote mode fork and exec events
805
806 ** GDB now has support for fork and exec events on target remote mode
807 Linux targets. For such targets with Linux kernels 2.5.46 and later,
808 this enables follow-fork-mode, detach-on-fork, follow-exec-mode, and
809 fork and exec catchpoints.
810
811 * Remote syscall events
812
813 ** GDB now has support for catch syscall on remote Linux targets,
814 currently enabled on x86/x86_64 architectures.
815
816 set remote catch-syscall-packet
817 show remote catch-syscall-packet
818 Set/show the use of the remote catch syscall feature.
819
820 * MI changes
821
822 ** The -var-set-format command now accepts the zero-hexadecimal
823 format. It outputs data in hexadecimal format with zero-padding on the
824 left.
825
826 * Python Scripting
827
828 ** gdb.InferiorThread objects have a new attribute "global_num",
829 which refers to the thread's global thread ID. The existing
830 "num" attribute now refers to the thread's per-inferior number.
831 See "Per-inferior thread numbers" above.
832 ** gdb.InferiorThread objects have a new attribute "inferior", which
833 is the Inferior object the thread belongs to.
834
835 *** Changes in GDB 7.10
836
837 * Support for process record-replay and reverse debugging on aarch64*-linux*
838 targets has been added. GDB now supports recording of A64 instruction set
839 including advance SIMD instructions.
840
841 * Support for Sun's version of the "stabs" debug file format has been removed.
842
843 * GDB now honors the content of the file /proc/PID/coredump_filter
844 (PID is the process ID) on GNU/Linux systems. This file can be used
845 to specify the types of memory mappings that will be included in a
846 corefile. For more information, please refer to the manual page of
847 "core(5)". GDB also has a new command: "set use-coredump-filter
848 on|off". It allows to set whether GDB will read the content of the
849 /proc/PID/coredump_filter file when generating a corefile.
850
851 * The "info os" command on GNU/Linux can now display information on
852 cpu information :
853 "info os cpus" Listing of all cpus/cores on the system
854
855 * GDB has two new commands: "set serial parity odd|even|none" and
856 "show serial parity". These allows to set or show parity for the
857 remote serial I/O.
858
859 * The "info source" command now displays the producer string if it was
860 present in the debug info. This typically includes the compiler version
861 and may include things like its command line arguments.
862
863 * The "info dll", an alias of the "info sharedlibrary" command,
864 is now available on all platforms.
865
866 * Directory names supplied to the "set sysroot" commands may be
867 prefixed with "target:" to tell GDB to access shared libraries from
868 the target system, be it local or remote. This replaces the prefix
869 "remote:". The default sysroot has been changed from "" to
870 "target:". "remote:" is automatically converted to "target:" for
871 backward compatibility.
872
873 * The system root specified by "set sysroot" will be prepended to the
874 filename of the main executable (if reported to GDB as absolute by
875 the operating system) when starting processes remotely, and when
876 attaching to already-running local or remote processes.
877
878 * GDB now supports automatic location and retrieval of executable
879 files from remote targets. Remote debugging can now be initiated
880 using only a "target remote" or "target extended-remote" command
881 (no "set sysroot" or "file" commands are required). See "New remote
882 packets" below.
883
884 * The "dump" command now supports verilog hex format.
885
886 * GDB now supports the vector ABI on S/390 GNU/Linux targets.
887
888 * On GNU/Linux, GDB and gdbserver are now able to access executable
889 and shared library files without a "set sysroot" command when
890 attaching to processes running in different mount namespaces from
891 the debugger. This makes it possible to attach to processes in
892 containers as simply as "gdb -p PID" or "gdbserver --attach PID".
893 See "New remote packets" below.
894
895 * The "tui reg" command now provides completion for all of the
896 available register groups, including target specific groups.
897
898 * The HISTSIZE environment variable is no longer read when determining
899 the size of GDB's command history. GDB now instead reads the dedicated
900 GDBHISTSIZE environment variable. Setting GDBHISTSIZE to "-1" or to "" now
901 disables truncation of command history. Non-numeric values of GDBHISTSIZE
902 are ignored.
903
904 * Guile Scripting
905
906 ** Memory ports can now be unbuffered.
907
908 * Python Scripting
909
910 ** gdb.Objfile objects have a new attribute "username",
911 which is the name of the objfile as specified by the user,
912 without, for example, resolving symlinks.
913 ** You can now write frame unwinders in Python.
914 ** gdb.Type objects have a new method "optimized_out",
915 returning optimized out gdb.Value instance of this type.
916 ** gdb.Value objects have new methods "reference_value" and
917 "const_value" which return a reference to the value and a
918 "const" version of the value respectively.
919
920 * New commands
921
922 maint print symbol-cache
923 Print the contents of the symbol cache.
924
925 maint print symbol-cache-statistics
926 Print statistics of symbol cache usage.
927
928 maint flush-symbol-cache
929 Flush the contents of the symbol cache.
930
931 record btrace bts
932 record bts
933 Start branch trace recording using Branch Trace Store (BTS) format.
934
935 compile print
936 Evaluate expression by using the compiler and print result.
937
938 tui enable
939 tui disable
940 Explicit commands for enabling and disabling tui mode.
941
942 show mpx bound
943 set mpx bound on i386 and amd64
944 Support for bound table investigation on Intel MPX enabled applications.
945
946 record btrace pt
947 record pt
948 Start branch trace recording using Intel Processor Trace format.
949
950 maint info btrace
951 Print information about branch tracing internals.
952
953 maint btrace packet-history
954 Print the raw branch tracing data.
955
956 maint btrace clear-packet-history
957 Discard the stored raw branch tracing data.
958
959 maint btrace clear
960 Discard all branch tracing data. It will be fetched and processed
961 anew by the next "record" command.
962
963 * New options
964
965 set debug dwarf-die
966 Renamed from "set debug dwarf2-die".
967 show debug dwarf-die
968 Renamed from "show debug dwarf2-die".
969
970 set debug dwarf-read
971 Renamed from "set debug dwarf2-read".
972 show debug dwarf-read
973 Renamed from "show debug dwarf2-read".
974
975 maint set dwarf always-disassemble
976 Renamed from "maint set dwarf2 always-disassemble".
977 maint show dwarf always-disassemble
978 Renamed from "maint show dwarf2 always-disassemble".
979
980 maint set dwarf max-cache-age
981 Renamed from "maint set dwarf2 max-cache-age".
982 maint show dwarf max-cache-age
983 Renamed from "maint show dwarf2 max-cache-age".
984
985 set debug dwarf-line
986 show debug dwarf-line
987 Control display of debugging info regarding DWARF line processing.
988
989 set max-completions
990 show max-completions
991 Set the maximum number of candidates to be considered during
992 completion. The default value is 200. This limit allows GDB
993 to avoid generating large completion lists, the computation of
994 which can cause the debugger to become temporarily unresponsive.
995
996 set history remove-duplicates
997 show history remove-duplicates
998 Control the removal of duplicate history entries.
999
1000 maint set symbol-cache-size
1001 maint show symbol-cache-size
1002 Control the size of the symbol cache.
1003
1004 set|show record btrace bts buffer-size
1005 Set and show the size of the ring buffer used for branch tracing in
1006 BTS format.
1007 The obtained size may differ from the requested size. Use "info
1008 record" to see the obtained buffer size.
1009
1010 set debug linux-namespaces
1011 show debug linux-namespaces
1012 Control display of debugging info regarding Linux namespaces.
1013
1014 set|show record btrace pt buffer-size
1015 Set and show the size of the ring buffer used for branch tracing in
1016 Intel Processor Trace format.
1017 The obtained size may differ from the requested size. Use "info
1018 record" to see the obtained buffer size.
1019
1020 maint set|show btrace pt skip-pad
1021 Set and show whether PAD packets are skipped when computing the
1022 packet history.
1023
1024 * The command 'thread apply all' can now support new option '-ascending'
1025 to call its specified command for all threads in ascending order.
1026
1027 * Python/Guile scripting
1028
1029 ** GDB now supports auto-loading of Python/Guile scripts contained in the
1030 special section named `.debug_gdb_scripts'.
1031
1032 * New remote packets
1033
1034 qXfer:btrace-conf:read
1035 Return the branch trace configuration for the current thread.
1036
1037 Qbtrace-conf:bts:size
1038 Set the requested ring buffer size for branch tracing in BTS format.
1039
1040 Qbtrace:pt
1041 Enable Intel Procesor Trace-based branch tracing for the current
1042 process. The remote stub reports support for this packet to GDB's
1043 qSupported query.
1044
1045 Qbtrace-conf:pt:size
1046 Set the requested ring buffer size for branch tracing in Intel Processor
1047 Trace format.
1048
1049 swbreak stop reason
1050 Indicates a memory breakpoint instruction was executed, irrespective
1051 of whether it was GDB that planted the breakpoint or the breakpoint
1052 is hardcoded in the program. This is required for correct non-stop
1053 mode operation.
1054
1055 hwbreak stop reason
1056 Indicates the target stopped for a hardware breakpoint. This is
1057 required for correct non-stop mode operation.
1058
1059 vFile:fstat:
1060 Return information about files on the remote system.
1061
1062 qXfer:exec-file:read
1063 Return the full absolute name of the file that was executed to
1064 create a process running on the remote system.
1065
1066 vFile:setfs:
1067 Select the filesystem on which vFile: operations with filename
1068 arguments will operate. This is required for GDB to be able to
1069 access files on remote targets where the remote stub does not
1070 share a common filesystem with the inferior(s).
1071
1072 fork stop reason
1073 Indicates that a fork system call was executed.
1074
1075 vfork stop reason
1076 Indicates that a vfork system call was executed.
1077
1078 vforkdone stop reason
1079 Indicates that a vfork child of the specified process has executed
1080 an exec or exit, allowing the vfork parent to resume execution.
1081
1082 fork-events and vfork-events features in qSupported
1083 The qSupported packet allows GDB to request support for fork and
1084 vfork events using new 'gdbfeatures' fork-events and vfork-events,
1085 and the qSupported response can contain the corresponding
1086 'stubfeatures'. Set and show commands can be used to display
1087 whether these features are enabled.
1088
1089 * Extended-remote fork events
1090
1091 ** GDB now has support for fork events on extended-remote Linux
1092 targets. For targets with Linux kernels 2.5.60 and later, this
1093 enables follow-fork-mode and detach-on-fork for both fork and
1094 vfork, as well as fork and vfork catchpoints.
1095
1096 * The info record command now shows the recording format and the
1097 branch tracing configuration for the current thread when using
1098 the btrace record target.
1099 For the BTS format, it shows the ring buffer size.
1100
1101 * GDB now has support for DTrace USDT (Userland Static Defined
1102 Tracing) probes. The supported targets are x86_64-*-linux-gnu.
1103
1104 * GDB now supports access to vector registers on S/390 GNU/Linux
1105 targets.
1106
1107 * Removed command line options
1108
1109 -xdb HP-UX XDB compatibility mode.
1110
1111 * Removed targets and native configurations
1112
1113 HP/PA running HP-UX hppa*-*-hpux*
1114 Itanium running HP-UX ia64-*-hpux*
1115
1116 * New configure options
1117
1118 --with-intel-pt
1119 This configure option allows the user to build GDB with support for
1120 Intel Processor Trace (default: auto). This requires libipt.
1121
1122 --with-libipt-prefix=PATH
1123 Specify the path to the version of libipt that GDB should use.
1124 $PATH/include should contain the intel-pt.h header and
1125 $PATH/lib should contain the libipt.so library.
1126
1127 *** Changes in GDB 7.9.1
1128
1129 * Python Scripting
1130
1131 ** Xmethods can now specify a result type.
1132
1133 *** Changes in GDB 7.9
1134
1135 * GDB now supports hardware watchpoints on x86 GNU Hurd.
1136
1137 * Python Scripting
1138
1139 ** You can now access frame registers from Python scripts.
1140 ** New attribute 'producer' for gdb.Symtab objects.
1141 ** gdb.Objfile objects have a new attribute "progspace",
1142 which is the gdb.Progspace object of the containing program space.
1143 ** gdb.Objfile objects have a new attribute "owner".
1144 ** gdb.Objfile objects have a new attribute "build_id",
1145 which is the build ID generated when the file was built.
1146 ** gdb.Objfile objects have a new method "add_separate_debug_file".
1147 ** A new event "gdb.clear_objfiles" has been added, triggered when
1148 selecting a new file to debug.
1149 ** You can now add attributes to gdb.Objfile and gdb.Progspace objects.
1150 ** New function gdb.lookup_objfile.
1151
1152 New events which are triggered when GDB modifies the state of the
1153 inferior.
1154
1155 ** gdb.events.inferior_call_pre: Function call is about to be made.
1156 ** gdb.events.inferior_call_post: Function call has just been made.
1157 ** gdb.events.memory_changed: A memory location has been altered.
1158 ** gdb.events.register_changed: A register has been altered.
1159
1160 * New Python-based convenience functions:
1161
1162 ** $_caller_is(name [, number_of_frames])
1163 ** $_caller_matches(regexp [, number_of_frames])
1164 ** $_any_caller_is(name [, number_of_frames])
1165 ** $_any_caller_matches(regexp [, number_of_frames])
1166
1167 * GDB now supports the compilation and injection of source code into
1168 the inferior. GDB will use GCC 5.0 or higher built with libcc1.so
1169 to compile the source code to object code, and if successful, inject
1170 and execute that code within the current context of the inferior.
1171 Currently the C language is supported. The commands used to
1172 interface with this new feature are:
1173
1174 compile code [-raw|-r] [--] [source code]
1175 compile file [-raw|-r] filename
1176
1177 * New commands
1178
1179 demangle [-l language] [--] name
1180 Demangle "name" in the specified language, or the current language
1181 if elided. This command is renamed from the "maint demangle" command.
1182 The latter is kept as a no-op to avoid "maint demangle" being interpreted
1183 as "maint demangler-warning".
1184
1185 queue-signal signal-name-or-number
1186 Queue a signal to be delivered to the thread when it is resumed.
1187
1188 add-auto-load-scripts-directory directory
1189 Add entries to the list of directories from which to load auto-loaded
1190 scripts.
1191
1192 maint print user-registers
1193 List all currently available "user" registers.
1194
1195 compile code [-r|-raw] [--] [source code]
1196 Compile, inject, and execute in the inferior the executable object
1197 code produced by compiling the provided source code.
1198
1199 compile file [-r|-raw] filename
1200 Compile and inject into the inferior the executable object code
1201 produced by compiling the source code stored in the filename
1202 provided.
1203
1204 * On resume, GDB now always passes the signal the program had stopped
1205 for to the thread the signal was sent to, even if the user changed
1206 threads before resuming. Previously GDB would often (but not
1207 always) deliver the signal to the thread that happens to be current
1208 at resume time.
1209
1210 * Conversely, the "signal" command now consistently delivers the
1211 requested signal to the current thread. GDB now asks for
1212 confirmation if the program had stopped for a signal and the user
1213 switched threads meanwhile.
1214
1215 * "breakpoint always-inserted" modes "off" and "auto" merged.
1216
1217 Now, when 'breakpoint always-inserted mode' is set to "off", GDB
1218 won't remove breakpoints from the target until all threads stop,
1219 even in non-stop mode. The "auto" mode has been removed, and "off"
1220 is now the default mode.
1221
1222 * New options
1223
1224 set debug symbol-lookup
1225 show debug symbol-lookup
1226 Control display of debugging info regarding symbol lookup.
1227
1228 * MI changes
1229
1230 ** The -list-thread-groups command outputs an exit-code field for
1231 inferiors that have exited.
1232
1233 * New targets
1234
1235 MIPS SDE mips*-sde*-elf*
1236
1237 * Removed targets
1238
1239 Support for these obsolete configurations has been removed.
1240
1241 Alpha running OSF/1 (or Tru64) alpha*-*-osf*
1242 SGI Irix-5.x mips-*-irix5*
1243 SGI Irix-6.x mips-*-irix6*
1244 VAX running (4.2 - 4.3 Reno) BSD vax-*-bsd*
1245 VAX running Ultrix vax-*-ultrix*
1246
1247 * The "dll-symbols" command, and its two aliases ("add-shared-symbol-files"
1248 and "assf"), have been removed. Use the "sharedlibrary" command, or
1249 its alias "share", instead.
1250
1251 *** Changes in GDB 7.8
1252
1253 * New command line options
1254
1255 -D data-directory
1256 This is an alias for the --data-directory option.
1257
1258 * GDB supports printing and modifying of variable length automatic arrays
1259 as specified in ISO C99.
1260
1261 * The ARM simulator now supports instruction level tracing
1262 with or without disassembly.
1263
1264 * Guile scripting
1265
1266 GDB now has support for scripting using Guile. Whether this is
1267 available is determined at configure time.
1268 Guile version 2.0 or greater is required.
1269 Guile version 2.0.9 is well tested, earlier 2.0 versions are not.
1270
1271 * New commands (for set/show, see "New options" below)
1272
1273 guile [code]
1274 gu [code]
1275 Invoke CODE by passing it to the Guile interpreter.
1276
1277 guile-repl
1278 gr
1279 Start a Guile interactive prompt (or "repl" for "read-eval-print loop").
1280
1281 info auto-load guile-scripts [regexp]
1282 Print the list of automatically loaded Guile scripts.
1283
1284 * The source command is now capable of sourcing Guile scripts.
1285 This feature is dependent on the debugger being built with Guile support.
1286
1287 * New options
1288
1289 set print symbol-loading (off|brief|full)
1290 show print symbol-loading
1291 Control whether to print informational messages when loading symbol
1292 information for a file. The default is "full", but when debugging
1293 programs with large numbers of shared libraries the amount of output
1294 becomes less useful.
1295
1296 set guile print-stack (none|message|full)
1297 show guile print-stack
1298 Show a stack trace when an error is encountered in a Guile script.
1299
1300 set auto-load guile-scripts (on|off)
1301 show auto-load guile-scripts
1302 Control auto-loading of Guile script files.
1303
1304 maint ada set ignore-descriptive-types (on|off)
1305 maint ada show ignore-descriptive-types
1306 Control whether the debugger should ignore descriptive types in Ada
1307 programs. The default is not to ignore the descriptive types. See
1308 the user manual for more details on descriptive types and the intended
1309 usage of this option.
1310
1311 set auto-connect-native-target
1312
1313 Control whether GDB is allowed to automatically connect to the
1314 native target for the run, attach, etc. commands when not connected
1315 to any target yet. See also "target native" below.
1316
1317 set record btrace replay-memory-access (read-only|read-write)
1318 show record btrace replay-memory-access
1319 Control what memory accesses are allowed during replay.
1320
1321 maint set target-async (on|off)
1322 maint show target-async
1323 This controls whether GDB targets operate in synchronous or
1324 asynchronous mode. Normally the default is asynchronous, if it is
1325 available; but this can be changed to more easily debug problems
1326 occurring only in synchronous mode.
1327
1328 set mi-async (on|off)
1329 show mi-async
1330 Control whether MI asynchronous mode is preferred. This supersedes
1331 "set target-async" of previous GDB versions.
1332
1333 * "set target-async" is deprecated as a CLI option and is now an alias
1334 for "set mi-async" (only puts MI into async mode).
1335
1336 * Background execution commands (e.g., "c&", "s&", etc.) are now
1337 possible ``out of the box'' if the target supports them. Previously
1338 the user would need to explicitly enable the possibility with the
1339 "set target-async on" command.
1340
1341 * New features in the GDB remote stub, GDBserver
1342
1343 ** New option --debug-format=option1[,option2,...] allows one to add
1344 additional text to each output. At present only timestamps
1345 are supported: --debug-format=timestamps.
1346 Timestamps can also be turned on with the
1347 "monitor set debug-format timestamps" command from GDB.
1348
1349 * The 'record instruction-history' command now starts counting instructions
1350 at one. This also affects the instruction ranges reported by the
1351 'record function-call-history' command when given the /i modifier.
1352
1353 * The command 'record function-call-history' supports a new modifier '/c' to
1354 indent the function names based on their call stack depth.
1355 The fields for the '/i' and '/l' modifier have been reordered.
1356 The source line range is now prefixed with 'at'.
1357 The instruction range is now prefixed with 'inst'.
1358 Both ranges are now printed as '<from>, <to>' to allow copy&paste to the
1359 "record instruction-history" and "list" commands.
1360
1361 * The ranges given as arguments to the 'record function-call-history' and
1362 'record instruction-history' commands are now inclusive.
1363
1364 * The btrace record target now supports the 'record goto' command.
1365 For locations inside the execution trace, the back trace is computed
1366 based on the information stored in the execution trace.
1367
1368 * The btrace record target supports limited reverse execution and replay.
1369 The target does not record data and therefore does not allow reading
1370 memory or registers.
1371
1372 * The "catch syscall" command now works on s390*-linux* targets.
1373
1374 * The "compare-sections" command is no longer specific to target
1375 remote. It now works with all targets.
1376
1377 * All native targets are now consistently called "native".
1378 Consequently, the "target child", "target GNU", "target djgpp",
1379 "target procfs" (Solaris/Irix/OSF/AIX) and "target darwin-child"
1380 commands have been replaced with "target native". The QNX/NTO port
1381 leaves the "procfs" target in place and adds a "native" target for
1382 consistency with other ports. The impact on users should be minimal
1383 as these commands previously either throwed an error, or were
1384 no-ops. The target's name is visible in the output of the following
1385 commands: "help target", "info target", "info files", "maint print
1386 target-stack".
1387
1388 * The "target native" command now connects to the native target. This
1389 can be used to launch native programs even when "set
1390 auto-connect-native-target" is set to off.
1391
1392 * GDB now supports access to Intel MPX registers on GNU/Linux.
1393
1394 * Support for Intel AVX-512 registers on GNU/Linux.
1395 Support displaying and modifying Intel AVX-512 registers
1396 $zmm0 - $zmm31 and $k0 - $k7 on GNU/Linux.
1397
1398 * New remote packets
1399
1400 qXfer:btrace:read's annex
1401 The qXfer:btrace:read packet supports a new annex 'delta' to read
1402 branch trace incrementally.
1403
1404 * Python Scripting
1405
1406 ** Valid Python operations on gdb.Value objects representing
1407 structs/classes invoke the corresponding overloaded operators if
1408 available.
1409 ** New `Xmethods' feature in the Python API. Xmethods are
1410 additional methods or replacements for existing methods of a C++
1411 class. This feature is useful for those cases where a method
1412 defined in C++ source code could be inlined or optimized out by
1413 the compiler, making it unavailable to GDB.
1414
1415 * New targets
1416 PowerPC64 GNU/Linux little-endian powerpc64le-*-linux*
1417
1418 * The "dll-symbols" command, and its two aliases ("add-shared-symbol-files"
1419 and "assf"), have been deprecated. Use the "sharedlibrary" command, or
1420 its alias "share", instead.
1421
1422 * The commands "set remotebaud" and "show remotebaud" are no longer
1423 supported. Use "set serial baud" and "show serial baud" (respectively)
1424 instead.
1425
1426 * MI changes
1427
1428 ** A new option "-gdb-set mi-async" replaces "-gdb-set
1429 target-async". The latter is left as a deprecated alias of the
1430 former for backward compatibility. If the target supports it,
1431 CLI background execution commands are now always possible by
1432 default, independently of whether the frontend stated a
1433 preference for asynchronous execution with "-gdb-set mi-async".
1434 Previously "-gdb-set target-async off" affected both MI execution
1435 commands and CLI execution commands.
1436
1437 *** Changes in GDB 7.7
1438
1439 * Improved support for process record-replay and reverse debugging on
1440 arm*-linux* targets. Support for thumb32 and syscall instruction
1441 recording has been added.
1442
1443 * GDB now supports SystemTap SDT probes on AArch64 GNU/Linux.
1444
1445 * GDB now supports Fission DWP file format version 2.
1446 http://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/DebugFission
1447
1448 * New convenience function "$_isvoid", to check whether an expression
1449 is void. A void expression is an expression where the type of the
1450 result is "void". For example, some convenience variables may be
1451 "void" when evaluated (e.g., "$_exitcode" before the execution of
1452 the program being debugged; or an undefined convenience variable).
1453 Another example, when calling a function whose return type is
1454 "void".
1455
1456 * The "maintenance print objfiles" command now takes an optional regexp.
1457
1458 * The "catch syscall" command now works on arm*-linux* targets.
1459
1460 * GDB now consistently shows "<not saved>" when printing values of
1461 registers the debug info indicates have not been saved in the frame
1462 and there's nowhere to retrieve them from
1463 (callee-saved/call-clobbered registers):
1464
1465 (gdb) p $rax
1466 $1 = <not saved>
1467
1468 (gdb) info registers rax
1469 rax <not saved>
1470
1471 Before, the former would print "<optimized out>", and the latter
1472 "*value not available*".
1473
1474 * New script contrib/gdb-add-index.sh for adding .gdb_index sections
1475 to binaries.
1476
1477 * Python scripting
1478
1479 ** Frame filters and frame decorators have been added.
1480 ** Temporary breakpoints are now supported.
1481 ** Line tables representation has been added.
1482 ** New attribute 'parent_type' for gdb.Field objects.
1483 ** gdb.Field objects can be used as subscripts on gdb.Value objects.
1484 ** New attribute 'name' for gdb.Type objects.
1485
1486 * New targets
1487
1488 Nios II ELF nios2*-*-elf
1489 Nios II GNU/Linux nios2*-*-linux
1490 Texas Instruments MSP430 msp430*-*-elf
1491
1492 * Removed native configurations
1493
1494 Support for these a.out NetBSD and OpenBSD obsolete configurations has
1495 been removed. ELF variants of these configurations are kept supported.
1496
1497 arm*-*-netbsd* but arm*-*-netbsdelf* is kept supported.
1498 i[34567]86-*-netbsd* but i[34567]86-*-netbsdelf* is kept supported.
1499 i[34567]86-*-openbsd[0-2].* but i[34567]86-*-openbsd* is kept supported.
1500 i[34567]86-*-openbsd3.[0-3]
1501 m68*-*-netbsd* but m68*-*-netbsdelf* is kept supported.
1502 sparc-*-netbsd* but sparc-*-netbsdelf* is kept supported.
1503 vax-*-netbsd* but vax-*-netbsdelf* is kept supported.
1504
1505 * New commands:
1506 catch rethrow
1507 Like "catch throw", but catches a re-thrown exception.
1508 maint check-psymtabs
1509 Renamed from old "maint check-symtabs".
1510 maint check-symtabs
1511 Perform consistency checks on symtabs.
1512 maint expand-symtabs
1513 Expand symtabs matching an optional regexp.
1514
1515 show configuration
1516 Display the details of GDB configure-time options.
1517
1518 maint set|show per-command
1519 maint set|show per-command space
1520 maint set|show per-command time
1521 maint set|show per-command symtab
1522 Enable display of per-command gdb resource usage.
1523
1524 remove-symbol-file FILENAME
1525 remove-symbol-file -a ADDRESS
1526 Remove a symbol file added via add-symbol-file. The file to remove
1527 can be identified by its filename or by an address that lies within
1528 the boundaries of this symbol file in memory.
1529
1530 info exceptions
1531 info exceptions REGEXP
1532 Display the list of Ada exceptions defined in the program being
1533 debugged. If provided, only the exceptions whose names match REGEXP
1534 are listed.
1535
1536 * New options
1537
1538 set debug symfile off|on
1539 show debug symfile
1540 Control display of debugging info regarding reading symbol files and
1541 symbol tables within those files
1542
1543 set print raw frame-arguments
1544 show print raw frame-arguments
1545 Set/show whether to print frame arguments in raw mode,
1546 disregarding any defined pretty-printers.
1547
1548 set remote trace-status-packet
1549 show remote trace-status-packet
1550 Set/show the use of remote protocol qTStatus packet.
1551
1552 set debug nios2
1553 show debug nios2
1554 Control display of debugging messages related to Nios II targets.
1555
1556 set range-stepping
1557 show range-stepping
1558 Control whether target-assisted range stepping is enabled.
1559
1560 set startup-with-shell
1561 show startup-with-shell
1562 Specifies whether Unix child processes are started via a shell or
1563 directly.
1564
1565 set code-cache
1566 show code-cache
1567 Use the target memory cache for accesses to the code segment. This
1568 improves performance of remote debugging (particularly disassembly).
1569
1570 * You can now use a literal value 'unlimited' for options that
1571 interpret 0 or -1 as meaning "unlimited". E.g., "set
1572 trace-buffer-size unlimited" is now an alias for "set
1573 trace-buffer-size -1" and "set height unlimited" is now an alias for
1574 "set height 0".
1575
1576 * The "set debug symtab-create" debugging option of GDB has been changed to
1577 accept a verbosity level. 0 means "off", 1 provides basic debugging
1578 output, and values of 2 or greater provides more verbose output.
1579
1580 * New command-line options
1581 --configuration
1582 Display the details of GDB configure-time options.
1583
1584 * The command 'tsave' can now support new option '-ctf' to save trace
1585 buffer in Common Trace Format.
1586
1587 * Newly installed $prefix/bin/gcore acts as a shell interface for the
1588 GDB command gcore.
1589
1590 * GDB now implements the the C++ 'typeid' operator.
1591
1592 * The new convenience variable $_exception holds the exception being
1593 thrown or caught at an exception-related catchpoint.
1594
1595 * The exception-related catchpoints, like "catch throw", now accept a
1596 regular expression which can be used to filter exceptions by type.
1597
1598 * The new convenience variable $_exitsignal is automatically set to
1599 the terminating signal number when the program being debugged dies
1600 due to an uncaught signal.
1601
1602 * MI changes
1603
1604 ** All MI commands now accept an optional "--language" option.
1605 Support for this feature can be verified by using the "-list-features"
1606 command, which should contain "language-option".
1607
1608 ** The new command -info-gdb-mi-command allows the user to determine
1609 whether a GDB/MI command is supported or not.
1610
1611 ** The "^error" result record returned when trying to execute an undefined
1612 GDB/MI command now provides a variable named "code" whose content is the
1613 "undefined-command" error code. Support for this feature can be verified
1614 by using the "-list-features" command, which should contain
1615 "undefined-command-error-code".
1616
1617 ** The -trace-save MI command can optionally save trace buffer in Common
1618 Trace Format now.
1619
1620 ** The new command -dprintf-insert sets a dynamic printf breakpoint.
1621
1622 ** The command -data-list-register-values now accepts an optional
1623 "--skip-unavailable" option. When used, only the available registers
1624 are displayed.
1625
1626 ** The new command -trace-frame-collected dumps collected variables,
1627 computed expressions, tvars, memory and registers in a traceframe.
1628
1629 ** The commands -stack-list-locals, -stack-list-arguments and
1630 -stack-list-variables now accept an option "--skip-unavailable".
1631 When used, only the available locals or arguments are displayed.
1632
1633 ** The -exec-run command now accepts an optional "--start" option.
1634 When used, the command follows the same semantics as the "start"
1635 command, stopping the program's execution at the start of its
1636 main subprogram. Support for this feature can be verified using
1637 the "-list-features" command, which should contain
1638 "exec-run-start-option".
1639
1640 ** The new commands -catch-assert and -catch-exceptions insert
1641 catchpoints stopping the program when Ada exceptions are raised.
1642
1643 ** The new command -info-ada-exceptions provides the equivalent of
1644 the new "info exceptions" command.
1645
1646 * New system-wide configuration scripts
1647 A GDB installation now provides scripts suitable for use as system-wide
1648 configuration scripts for the following systems:
1649 ** ElinOS
1650 ** Wind River Linux
1651
1652 * GDB now supports target-assigned range stepping with remote targets.
1653 This improves the performance of stepping source lines by reducing
1654 the number of control packets from/to GDB. See "New remote packets"
1655 below.
1656
1657 * GDB now understands the element 'tvar' in the XML traceframe info.
1658 It has the id of the collected trace state variables.
1659
1660 * On S/390 targets that provide the transactional-execution feature,
1661 the program interruption transaction diagnostic block (TDB) is now
1662 represented as a number of additional "registers" in GDB.
1663
1664 * New remote packets
1665
1666 vCont;r
1667
1668 The vCont packet supports a new 'r' action, that tells the remote
1669 stub to step through an address range itself, without GDB
1670 involvemement at each single-step.
1671
1672 qXfer:libraries-svr4:read's annex
1673 The previously unused annex of the qXfer:libraries-svr4:read packet
1674 is now used to support passing an argument list. The remote stub
1675 reports support for this argument list to GDB's qSupported query.
1676 The defined arguments are "start" and "prev", used to reduce work
1677 necessary for library list updating, resulting in significant
1678 speedup.
1679
1680 * New features in the GDB remote stub, GDBserver
1681
1682 ** GDBserver now supports target-assisted range stepping. Currently
1683 enabled on x86/x86_64 GNU/Linux targets.
1684
1685 ** GDBserver now adds element 'tvar' in the XML in the reply to
1686 'qXfer:traceframe-info:read'. It has the id of the collected
1687 trace state variables.
1688
1689 ** GDBserver now supports hardware watchpoints on the MIPS GNU/Linux
1690 target.
1691
1692 * New 'z' formatter for printing and examining memory, this displays the
1693 value as hexadecimal zero padded on the left to the size of the type.
1694
1695 * GDB can now use Windows x64 unwinding data.
1696
1697 * The "set remotebaud" command has been replaced by "set serial baud".
1698 Similarly, "show remotebaud" has been replaced by "show serial baud".
1699 The "set remotebaud" and "show remotebaud" commands are still available
1700 to provide backward compatibility with older versions of GDB.
1701
1702 *** Changes in GDB 7.6
1703
1704 * Target record has been renamed to record-full.
1705 Record/replay is now enabled with the "record full" command.
1706 This also affects settings that are associated with full record/replay
1707 that have been moved from "set/show record" to "set/show record full":
1708
1709 set|show record full insn-number-max
1710 set|show record full stop-at-limit
1711 set|show record full memory-query
1712
1713 * A new record target "record-btrace" has been added. The new target
1714 uses hardware support to record the control-flow of a process. It
1715 does not support replaying the execution, but it implements the
1716 below new commands for investigating the recorded execution log.
1717 This new recording method can be enabled using:
1718
1719 record btrace
1720
1721 The "record-btrace" target is only available on Intel Atom processors
1722 and requires a Linux kernel 2.6.32 or later.
1723
1724 * Two new commands have been added for record/replay to give information
1725 about the recorded execution without having to replay the execution.
1726 The commands are only supported by "record btrace".
1727
1728 record instruction-history prints the execution history at
1729 instruction granularity
1730
1731 record function-call-history prints the execution history at
1732 function granularity
1733
1734 * New native configurations
1735
1736 ARM AArch64 GNU/Linux aarch64*-*-linux-gnu
1737 FreeBSD/powerpc powerpc*-*-freebsd
1738 x86_64/Cygwin x86_64-*-cygwin*
1739 Tilera TILE-Gx GNU/Linux tilegx*-*-linux-gnu
1740
1741 * New targets
1742
1743 ARM AArch64 aarch64*-*-elf
1744 ARM AArch64 GNU/Linux aarch64*-*-linux
1745 Lynx 178 PowerPC powerpc-*-lynx*178
1746 x86_64/Cygwin x86_64-*-cygwin*
1747 Tilera TILE-Gx GNU/Linux tilegx*-*-linux
1748
1749 * If the configured location of system.gdbinit file (as given by the
1750 --with-system-gdbinit option at configure time) is in the
1751 data-directory (as specified by --with-gdb-datadir at configure
1752 time) or in one of its subdirectories, then GDB will look for the
1753 system-wide init file in the directory specified by the
1754 --data-directory command-line option.
1755
1756 * New command line options:
1757
1758 -nh Disables auto-loading of ~/.gdbinit, but still executes all the
1759 other initialization files, unlike -nx which disables all of them.
1760
1761 * Removed command line options
1762
1763 -epoch This was used by the gdb mode in Epoch, an ancient fork of
1764 Emacs.
1765
1766 * The 'ptype' and 'whatis' commands now accept an argument to control
1767 type formatting.
1768
1769 * 'info proc' now works on some core files.
1770
1771 * Python scripting
1772
1773 ** Vectors can be created with gdb.Type.vector.
1774
1775 ** Python's atexit.register now works in GDB.
1776
1777 ** Types can be pretty-printed via a Python API.
1778
1779 ** Python 3 is now supported (in addition to Python 2.4 or later)
1780
1781 ** New class gdb.Architecture exposes GDB's internal representation
1782 of architecture in the Python API.
1783
1784 ** New method Frame.architecture returns the gdb.Architecture object
1785 corresponding to the frame's architecture.
1786
1787 * New Python-based convenience functions:
1788
1789 ** $_memeq(buf1, buf2, length)
1790 ** $_streq(str1, str2)
1791 ** $_strlen(str)
1792 ** $_regex(str, regex)
1793
1794 * The 'cd' command now defaults to using '~' (the home directory) if not
1795 given an argument.
1796
1797 * The C++ ABI now defaults to the GNU v3 ABI. This has been the
1798 default for GCC since November 2000.
1799
1800 * The command 'forward-search' can now be abbreviated as 'fo'.
1801
1802 * The command 'info tracepoints' can now display 'installed on target'
1803 or 'not installed on target' for each non-pending location of tracepoint.
1804
1805 * New configure options
1806
1807 --enable-libmcheck/--disable-libmcheck
1808 By default, development versions are built with -lmcheck on hosts
1809 that support it, in order to help track memory corruption issues.
1810 Release versions, on the other hand, are built without -lmcheck
1811 by default. The --enable-libmcheck/--disable-libmcheck configure
1812 options allow the user to override that default.
1813 --with-babeltrace/--with-babeltrace-include/--with-babeltrace-lib
1814 This configure option allows the user to build GDB with
1815 libbabeltrace using which GDB can read Common Trace Format data.
1816
1817 * New commands (for set/show, see "New options" below)
1818
1819 catch signal
1820 Catch signals. This is similar to "handle", but allows commands and
1821 conditions to be attached.
1822
1823 maint info bfds
1824 List the BFDs known to GDB.
1825
1826 python-interactive [command]
1827 pi [command]
1828 Start a Python interactive prompt, or evaluate the optional command
1829 and print the result of expressions.
1830
1831 py [command]
1832 "py" is a new alias for "python".
1833
1834 enable type-printer [name]...
1835 disable type-printer [name]...
1836 Enable or disable type printers.
1837
1838 * Removed commands
1839
1840 ** For the Renesas Super-H architecture, the "regs" command has been removed
1841 (has been deprecated in GDB 7.5), and "info all-registers" should be used
1842 instead.
1843
1844 * New options
1845
1846 set print type methods (on|off)
1847 show print type methods
1848 Control whether method declarations are displayed by "ptype".
1849 The default is to show them.
1850
1851 set print type typedefs (on|off)
1852 show print type typedefs
1853 Control whether typedef definitions are displayed by "ptype".
1854 The default is to show them.
1855
1856 set filename-display basename|relative|absolute
1857 show filename-display
1858 Control the way in which filenames is displayed.
1859 The default is "relative", which preserves previous behavior.
1860
1861 set trace-buffer-size
1862 show trace-buffer-size
1863 Request target to change the size of trace buffer.
1864
1865 set remote trace-buffer-size-packet auto|on|off
1866 show remote trace-buffer-size-packet
1867 Control the use of the remote protocol `QTBuffer:size' packet.
1868
1869 set debug aarch64
1870 show debug aarch64
1871 Control display of debugging messages related to ARM AArch64.
1872 The default is off.
1873
1874 set debug coff-pe-read
1875 show debug coff-pe-read
1876 Control display of debugging messages related to reading of COFF/PE
1877 exported symbols.
1878
1879 set debug mach-o
1880 show debug mach-o
1881 Control display of debugging messages related to Mach-O symbols
1882 processing.
1883
1884 set debug notification
1885 show debug notification
1886 Control display of debugging info for async remote notification.
1887
1888 * MI changes
1889
1890 ** Command parameter changes are now notified using new async record
1891 "=cmd-param-changed".
1892 ** Trace frame changes caused by command "tfind" are now notified using
1893 new async record "=traceframe-changed".
1894 ** The creation, deletion and modification of trace state variables
1895 are now notified using new async records "=tsv-created",
1896 "=tsv-deleted" and "=tsv-modified".
1897 ** The start and stop of process record are now notified using new
1898 async record "=record-started" and "=record-stopped".
1899 ** Memory changes are now notified using new async record
1900 "=memory-changed".
1901 ** The data-disassemble command response will include a "fullname" field
1902 containing the absolute file name when source has been requested.
1903 ** New optional parameter COUNT added to the "-data-write-memory-bytes"
1904 command, to allow pattern filling of memory areas.
1905 ** New commands "-catch-load"/"-catch-unload" added for intercepting
1906 library load/unload events.
1907 ** The response to breakpoint commands and breakpoint async records
1908 includes an "installed" field containing a boolean state about each
1909 non-pending tracepoint location is whether installed on target or not.
1910 ** Output of the "-trace-status" command includes a "trace-file" field
1911 containing the name of the trace file being examined. This field is
1912 optional, and only present when examining a trace file.
1913 ** The "fullname" field is now always present along with the "file" field,
1914 even if the file cannot be found by GDB.
1915
1916 * GDB now supports the "mini debuginfo" section, .gnu_debugdata.
1917 You must have the LZMA library available when configuring GDB for this
1918 feature to be enabled. For more information, see:
1919 http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/MiniDebugInfo
1920
1921 * New remote packets
1922
1923 QTBuffer:size
1924 Set the size of trace buffer. The remote stub reports support for this
1925 packet to gdb's qSupported query.
1926
1927 Qbtrace:bts
1928 Enable Branch Trace Store (BTS)-based branch tracing for the current
1929 thread. The remote stub reports support for this packet to gdb's
1930 qSupported query.
1931
1932 Qbtrace:off
1933 Disable branch tracing for the current thread. The remote stub reports
1934 support for this packet to gdb's qSupported query.
1935
1936 qXfer:btrace:read
1937 Read the traced branches for the current thread. The remote stub
1938 reports support for this packet to gdb's qSupported query.
1939
1940 *** Changes in GDB 7.5
1941
1942 * GDB now supports x32 ABI. Visit <http://sites.google.com/site/x32abi/>
1943 for more x32 ABI info.
1944
1945 * GDB now supports access to MIPS DSP registers on Linux targets.
1946
1947 * GDB now supports debugging microMIPS binaries.
1948
1949 * The "info os" command on GNU/Linux can now display information on
1950 several new classes of objects managed by the operating system:
1951 "info os procgroups" lists process groups
1952 "info os files" lists file descriptors
1953 "info os sockets" lists internet-domain sockets
1954 "info os shm" lists shared-memory regions
1955 "info os semaphores" lists semaphores
1956 "info os msg" lists message queues
1957 "info os modules" lists loaded kernel modules
1958
1959 * GDB now has support for SDT (Static Defined Tracing) probes. Currently,
1960 the only implemented backend is for SystemTap probes (<sys/sdt.h>). You
1961 can set a breakpoint using the new "-probe, "-pstap" or "-probe-stap"
1962 options and inspect the probe arguments using the new $_probe_arg family
1963 of convenience variables. You can obtain more information about SystemTap
1964 in <http://sourceware.org/systemtap/>.
1965
1966 * GDB now supports reversible debugging on ARM, it allows you to
1967 debug basic ARM and THUMB instructions, and provides
1968 record/replay support.
1969
1970 * The option "symbol-reloading" has been deleted as it is no longer used.
1971
1972 * Python scripting
1973
1974 ** GDB commands implemented in Python can now be put in command class
1975 "gdb.COMMAND_USER".
1976
1977 ** The "maint set python print-stack on|off" is now deleted.
1978
1979 ** A new class, gdb.printing.FlagEnumerationPrinter, can be used to
1980 apply "flag enum"-style pretty-printing to any enum.
1981
1982 ** gdb.lookup_symbol can now work when there is no current frame.
1983
1984 ** gdb.Symbol now has a 'line' attribute, holding the line number in
1985 the source at which the symbol was defined.
1986
1987 ** gdb.Symbol now has the new attribute 'needs_frame' and the new
1988 method 'value'. The former indicates whether the symbol needs a
1989 frame in order to compute its value, and the latter computes the
1990 symbol's value.
1991
1992 ** A new method 'referenced_value' on gdb.Value objects which can
1993 dereference pointer as well as C++ reference values.
1994
1995 ** New methods 'global_block' and 'static_block' on gdb.Symtab objects
1996 which return the global and static blocks (as gdb.Block objects),
1997 of the underlying symbol table, respectively.
1998
1999 ** New function gdb.find_pc_line which returns the gdb.Symtab_and_line
2000 object associated with a PC value.
2001
2002 ** gdb.Symtab_and_line has new attribute 'last' which holds the end
2003 of the address range occupied by code for the current source line.
2004
2005 * Go language support.
2006 GDB now supports debugging programs written in the Go programming
2007 language.
2008
2009 * GDBserver now supports stdio connections.
2010 E.g. (gdb) target remote | ssh myhost gdbserver - hello
2011
2012 * The binary "gdbtui" can no longer be built or installed.
2013 Use "gdb -tui" instead.
2014
2015 * GDB will now print "flag" enums specially. A flag enum is one where
2016 all the enumerator values have no bits in common when pairwise
2017 "and"ed. When printing a value whose type is a flag enum, GDB will
2018 show all the constants, e.g., for enum E { ONE = 1, TWO = 2}:
2019 (gdb) print (enum E) 3
2020 $1 = (ONE | TWO)
2021
2022 * The filename part of a linespec will now match trailing components
2023 of a source file name. For example, "break gcc/expr.c:1000" will
2024 now set a breakpoint in build/gcc/expr.c, but not
2025 build/libcpp/expr.c.
2026
2027 * The "info proc" and "generate-core-file" commands will now also
2028 work on remote targets connected to GDBserver on Linux.
2029
2030 * The command "info catch" has been removed. It has been disabled
2031 since December 2007.
2032
2033 * The "catch exception" and "catch assert" commands now accept
2034 a condition at the end of the command, much like the "break"
2035 command does. For instance:
2036
2037 (gdb) catch exception Constraint_Error if Barrier = True
2038
2039 Previously, it was possible to add a condition to such catchpoints,
2040 but it had to be done as a second step, after the catchpoint had been
2041 created, using the "condition" command.
2042
2043 * The "info static-tracepoint-marker" command will now also work on
2044 native Linux targets with in-process agent.
2045
2046 * GDB can now set breakpoints on inlined functions.
2047
2048 * The .gdb_index section has been updated to include symbols for
2049 inlined functions. GDB will ignore older .gdb_index sections by
2050 default, which could cause symbol files to be loaded more slowly
2051 until their .gdb_index sections can be recreated. The new command
2052 "set use-deprecated-index-sections on" will cause GDB to use any older
2053 .gdb_index sections it finds. This will restore performance, but the
2054 ability to set breakpoints on inlined functions will be lost in symbol
2055 files with older .gdb_index sections.
2056
2057 The .gdb_index section has also been updated to record more information
2058 about each symbol. This speeds up the "info variables", "info functions"
2059 and "info types" commands when used with programs having the .gdb_index
2060 section, as well as speeding up debugging with shared libraries using
2061 the .gdb_index section.
2062
2063 * Ada support for GDB/MI Variable Objects has been added.
2064
2065 * GDB can now support 'breakpoint always-inserted mode' in 'record'
2066 target.
2067
2068 * MI changes
2069
2070 ** New command -info-os is the MI equivalent of "info os".
2071
2072 ** Output logs ("set logging" and related) now include MI output.
2073
2074 * New commands
2075
2076 ** "set use-deprecated-index-sections on|off"
2077 "show use-deprecated-index-sections on|off"
2078 Controls the use of deprecated .gdb_index sections.
2079
2080 ** "catch load" and "catch unload" can be used to stop when a shared
2081 library is loaded or unloaded, respectively.
2082
2083 ** "enable count" can be used to auto-disable a breakpoint after
2084 several hits.
2085
2086 ** "info vtbl" can be used to show the virtual method tables for
2087 C++ and Java objects.
2088
2089 ** "explore" and its sub commands "explore value" and "explore type"
2090 can be used to recursively explore values and types of
2091 expressions. These commands are available only if GDB is
2092 configured with '--with-python'.
2093
2094 ** "info auto-load" shows status of all kinds of auto-loaded files,
2095 "info auto-load gdb-scripts" shows status of auto-loading GDB canned
2096 sequences of commands files, "info auto-load python-scripts"
2097 shows status of auto-loading Python script files,
2098 "info auto-load local-gdbinit" shows status of loading init file
2099 (.gdbinit) from current directory and "info auto-load libthread-db" shows
2100 status of inferior specific thread debugging shared library loading.
2101
2102 ** "info auto-load-scripts", "set auto-load-scripts on|off"
2103 and "show auto-load-scripts" commands have been deprecated, use their
2104 "info auto-load python-scripts", "set auto-load python-scripts on|off"
2105 and "show auto-load python-scripts" counterparts instead.
2106
2107 ** "dprintf location,format,args..." creates a dynamic printf, which
2108 is basically a breakpoint that does a printf and immediately
2109 resumes your program's execution, so it is like a printf that you
2110 can insert dynamically at runtime instead of at compiletime.
2111
2112 ** "set print symbol"
2113 "show print symbol"
2114 Controls whether GDB attempts to display the symbol, if any,
2115 corresponding to addresses it prints. This defaults to "on", but
2116 you can set it to "off" to restore GDB's previous behavior.
2117
2118 * Deprecated commands
2119
2120 ** For the Renesas Super-H architecture, the "regs" command has been
2121 deprecated, and "info all-registers" should be used instead.
2122
2123 * New targets
2124
2125 Renesas RL78 rl78-*-elf
2126 HP OpenVMS ia64 ia64-hp-openvms*
2127
2128 * GDBserver supports evaluation of breakpoint conditions. When
2129 support is advertised by GDBserver, GDB may be told to send the
2130 breakpoint conditions in bytecode form to GDBserver. GDBserver
2131 will only report the breakpoint trigger to GDB when its condition
2132 evaluates to true.
2133
2134 * New options
2135
2136 set mips compression
2137 show mips compression
2138 Select the compressed ISA encoding used in functions that have no symbol
2139 information available. The encoding can be set to either of:
2140 mips16
2141 micromips
2142 and is updated automatically from ELF file flags if available.
2143
2144 set breakpoint condition-evaluation
2145 show breakpoint condition-evaluation
2146 Control whether breakpoint conditions are evaluated by GDB ("host") or by
2147 GDBserver ("target"). Default option "auto" chooses the most efficient
2148 available mode.
2149 This option can improve debugger efficiency depending on the speed of the
2150 target.
2151
2152 set auto-load off
2153 Disable auto-loading globally.
2154
2155 show auto-load
2156 Show auto-loading setting of all kinds of auto-loaded files.
2157
2158 set auto-load gdb-scripts on|off
2159 show auto-load gdb-scripts
2160 Control auto-loading of GDB canned sequences of commands files.
2161
2162 set auto-load python-scripts on|off
2163 show auto-load python-scripts
2164 Control auto-loading of Python script files.
2165
2166 set auto-load local-gdbinit on|off
2167 show auto-load local-gdbinit
2168 Control loading of init file (.gdbinit) from current directory.
2169
2170 set auto-load libthread-db on|off
2171 show auto-load libthread-db
2172 Control auto-loading of inferior specific thread debugging shared library.
2173
2174 set auto-load scripts-directory <dir1>[:<dir2>...]
2175 show auto-load scripts-directory
2176 Set a list of directories from which to load auto-loaded scripts.
2177 Automatically loaded Python scripts and GDB scripts are located in one
2178 of the directories listed by this option.
2179 The delimiter (':' above) may differ according to the host platform.
2180
2181 set auto-load safe-path <dir1>[:<dir2>...]
2182 show auto-load safe-path
2183 Set a list of directories from which it is safe to auto-load files.
2184 The delimiter (':' above) may differ according to the host platform.
2185
2186 set debug auto-load on|off
2187 show debug auto-load
2188 Control display of debugging info for auto-loading the files above.
2189
2190 set dprintf-style gdb|call|agent
2191 show dprintf-style
2192 Control the way in which a dynamic printf is performed; "gdb"
2193 requests a GDB printf command, while "call" causes dprintf to call a
2194 function in the inferior. "agent" requests that the target agent
2195 (such as GDBserver) do the printing.
2196
2197 set dprintf-function <expr>
2198 show dprintf-function
2199 set dprintf-channel <expr>
2200 show dprintf-channel
2201 Set the function and optional first argument to the call when using
2202 the "call" style of dynamic printf.
2203
2204 set disconnected-dprintf on|off
2205 show disconnected-dprintf
2206 Control whether agent-style dynamic printfs continue to be in effect
2207 after GDB disconnects.
2208
2209 * New configure options
2210
2211 --with-auto-load-dir
2212 Configure default value for the 'set auto-load scripts-directory'
2213 setting above. It defaults to '$debugdir:$datadir/auto-load',
2214 $debugdir representing global debugging info directories (available
2215 via 'show debug-file-directory') and $datadir representing GDB's data
2216 directory (available via 'show data-directory').
2217
2218 --with-auto-load-safe-path
2219 Configure default value for the 'set auto-load safe-path' setting
2220 above. It defaults to the --with-auto-load-dir setting.
2221
2222 --without-auto-load-safe-path
2223 Set 'set auto-load safe-path' to '/', effectively disabling this
2224 security feature.
2225
2226 * New remote packets
2227
2228 z0/z1 conditional breakpoints extension
2229
2230 The z0/z1 breakpoint insertion packets have been extended to carry
2231 a list of conditional expressions over to the remote stub depending on the
2232 condition evaluation mode. The use of this extension can be controlled
2233 via the "set remote conditional-breakpoints-packet" command.
2234
2235 QProgramSignals:
2236
2237 Specify the signals which the remote stub may pass to the debugged
2238 program without GDB involvement.
2239
2240 * New command line options
2241
2242 --init-command=FILE, -ix Like --command, -x but execute it
2243 before loading inferior.
2244 --init-eval-command=COMMAND, -iex Like --eval-command=COMMAND, -ex but
2245 execute it before loading inferior.
2246
2247 *** Changes in GDB 7.4
2248
2249 * GDB now handles ambiguous linespecs more consistently; the existing
2250 FILE:LINE support has been expanded to other types of linespecs. A
2251 breakpoint will now be set on all matching locations in all
2252 inferiors, and locations will be added or removed according to
2253 inferior changes.
2254
2255 * GDB now allows you to skip uninteresting functions and files when
2256 stepping with the "skip function" and "skip file" commands.
2257
2258 * GDB has two new commands: "set remote hardware-watchpoint-length-limit"
2259 and "show remote hardware-watchpoint-length-limit". These allows to
2260 set or show the maximum length limit (in bytes) of a remote
2261 target hardware watchpoint.
2262
2263 This allows e.g. to use "unlimited" hardware watchpoints with the
2264 gdbserver integrated in Valgrind version >= 3.7.0. Such Valgrind
2265 watchpoints are slower than real hardware watchpoints but are
2266 significantly faster than gdb software watchpoints.
2267
2268 * Python scripting
2269
2270 ** The register_pretty_printer function in module gdb.printing now takes
2271 an optional `replace' argument. If True, the new printer replaces any
2272 existing one.
2273
2274 ** The "maint set python print-stack on|off" command has been
2275 deprecated and will be deleted in GDB 7.5.
2276 A new command: "set python print-stack none|full|message" has
2277 replaced it. Additionally, the default for "print-stack" is
2278 now "message", which just prints the error message without
2279 the stack trace.
2280
2281 ** A prompt substitution hook (prompt_hook) is now available to the
2282 Python API.
2283
2284 ** A new Python module, gdb.prompt has been added to the GDB Python
2285 modules library. This module provides functionality for
2286 escape sequences in prompts (used by set/show
2287 extended-prompt). These escape sequences are replaced by their
2288 corresponding value.
2289
2290 ** Python commands and convenience-functions located in
2291 'data-directory'/python/gdb/command and
2292 'data-directory'/python/gdb/function are now automatically loaded
2293 on GDB start-up.
2294
2295 ** Blocks now provide four new attributes. global_block and
2296 static_block will return the global and static blocks
2297 respectively. is_static and is_global are boolean attributes
2298 that indicate if the block is one of those two types.
2299
2300 ** Symbols now provide the "type" attribute, the type of the symbol.
2301
2302 ** The "gdb.breakpoint" function has been deprecated in favor of
2303 "gdb.breakpoints".
2304
2305 ** A new class "gdb.FinishBreakpoint" is provided to catch the return
2306 of a function. This class is based on the "finish" command
2307 available in the CLI.
2308
2309 ** Type objects for struct and union types now allow access to
2310 the fields using standard Python dictionary (mapping) methods.
2311 For example, "some_type['myfield']" now works, as does
2312 "some_type.items()".
2313
2314 ** A new event "gdb.new_objfile" has been added, triggered by loading a
2315 new object file.
2316
2317 ** A new function, "deep_items" has been added to the gdb.types
2318 module in the GDB Python modules library. This function returns
2319 an iterator over the fields of a struct or union type. Unlike
2320 the standard Python "iteritems" method, it will recursively traverse
2321 any anonymous fields.
2322
2323 * MI changes
2324
2325 ** "*stopped" events can report several new "reason"s, such as
2326 "solib-event".
2327
2328 ** Breakpoint changes are now notified using new async records, like
2329 "=breakpoint-modified".
2330
2331 ** New command -ada-task-info.
2332
2333 * libthread-db-search-path now supports two special values: $sdir and $pdir.
2334 $sdir specifies the default system locations of shared libraries.
2335 $pdir specifies the directory where the libpthread used by the application
2336 lives.
2337
2338 GDB no longer looks in $sdir and $pdir after it has searched the directories
2339 mentioned in libthread-db-search-path. If you want to search those
2340 directories, they must be specified in libthread-db-search-path.
2341 The default value of libthread-db-search-path on GNU/Linux and Solaris
2342 systems is now "$sdir:$pdir".
2343
2344 $pdir is not supported by gdbserver, it is currently ignored.
2345 $sdir is supported by gdbserver.
2346
2347 * New configure option --with-iconv-bin.
2348 When using the internationalization support like the one in the GNU C
2349 library, GDB will invoke the "iconv" program to get a list of supported
2350 character sets. If this program lives in a non-standard location, one can
2351 use this option to specify where to find it.
2352
2353 * When natively debugging programs on PowerPC BookE processors running
2354 a Linux kernel version 2.6.34 or later, GDB supports masked hardware
2355 watchpoints, which specify a mask in addition to an address to watch.
2356 The mask specifies that some bits of an address (the bits which are
2357 reset in the mask) should be ignored when matching the address accessed
2358 by the inferior against the watchpoint address. See the "PowerPC Embedded"
2359 section in the user manual for more details.
2360
2361 * The new option --once causes GDBserver to stop listening for connections once
2362 the first connection is made. The listening port used by GDBserver will
2363 become available after that.
2364
2365 * New commands "info macros" and "alias" have been added.
2366
2367 * New function parameters suffix @entry specifies value of function parameter
2368 at the time the function got called. Entry values are available only since
2369 gcc version 4.7.
2370
2371 * New commands
2372
2373 !SHELL COMMAND
2374 "!" is now an alias of the "shell" command.
2375 Note that no space is needed between "!" and SHELL COMMAND.
2376
2377 * Changed commands
2378
2379 watch EXPRESSION mask MASK_VALUE
2380 The watch command now supports the mask argument which allows creation
2381 of masked watchpoints, if the current architecture supports this feature.
2382
2383 info auto-load-scripts [REGEXP]
2384 This command was formerly named "maintenance print section-scripts".
2385 It is now generally useful and is no longer a maintenance-only command.
2386
2387 info macro [-all] [--] MACRO
2388 The info macro command has new options `-all' and `--'. The first for
2389 printing all definitions of a macro. The second for explicitly specifying
2390 the end of arguments and the beginning of the macro name in case the macro
2391 name starts with a hyphen.
2392
2393 collect[/s] EXPRESSIONS
2394 The tracepoint collect command now takes an optional modifier "/s"
2395 that directs it to dereference pointer-to-character types and
2396 collect the bytes of memory up to a zero byte. The behavior is
2397 similar to what you see when you use the regular print command on a
2398 string. An optional integer following the "/s" sets a bound on the
2399 number of bytes that will be collected.
2400
2401 tstart [NOTES]
2402 The trace start command now interprets any supplied arguments as a
2403 note to be recorded with the trace run, with an effect similar to
2404 setting the variable trace-notes.
2405
2406 tstop [NOTES]
2407 The trace stop command now interprets any arguments as a note to be
2408 mentioned along with the tstatus report that the trace was stopped
2409 with a command. The effect is similar to setting the variable
2410 trace-stop-notes.
2411
2412 * Tracepoints can now be enabled and disabled at any time after a trace
2413 experiment has been started using the standard "enable" and "disable"
2414 commands. It is now possible to start a trace experiment with no enabled
2415 tracepoints; GDB will display a warning, but will allow the experiment to
2416 begin, assuming that tracepoints will be enabled as needed while the trace
2417 is running.
2418
2419 * Fast tracepoints on 32-bit x86-architectures can now be placed at
2420 locations with 4-byte instructions, when they were previously
2421 limited to locations with instructions of 5 bytes or longer.
2422
2423 * New options
2424
2425 set debug dwarf2-read
2426 show debug dwarf2-read
2427 Turns on or off display of debugging messages related to reading
2428 DWARF debug info. The default is off.
2429
2430 set debug symtab-create
2431 show debug symtab-create
2432 Turns on or off display of debugging messages related to symbol table
2433 creation. The default is off.
2434
2435 set extended-prompt
2436 show extended-prompt
2437 Set the GDB prompt, and allow escape sequences to be inserted to
2438 display miscellaneous information (see 'help set extended-prompt'
2439 for the list of sequences). This prompt (and any information
2440 accessed through the escape sequences) is updated every time the
2441 prompt is displayed.
2442
2443 set print entry-values (both|compact|default|if-needed|no|only|preferred)
2444 show print entry-values
2445 Set printing of frame argument values at function entry. In some cases
2446 GDB can determine the value of function argument which was passed by the
2447 function caller, even if the value was modified inside the called function.
2448
2449 set debug entry-values
2450 show debug entry-values
2451 Control display of debugging info for determining frame argument values at
2452 function entry and virtual tail call frames.
2453
2454 set basenames-may-differ
2455 show basenames-may-differ
2456 Set whether a source file may have multiple base names.
2457 (A "base name" is the name of a file with the directory part removed.
2458 Example: The base name of "/home/user/hello.c" is "hello.c".)
2459 If set, GDB will canonicalize file names (e.g., expand symlinks)
2460 before comparing them. Canonicalization is an expensive operation,
2461 but it allows the same file be known by more than one base name.
2462 If not set (the default), all source files are assumed to have just
2463 one base name, and gdb will do file name comparisons more efficiently.
2464
2465 set trace-user
2466 show trace-user
2467 set trace-notes
2468 show trace-notes
2469 Set a user name and notes for the current and any future trace runs.
2470 This is useful for long-running and/or disconnected traces, to
2471 inform others (or yourself) as to who is running the trace, supply
2472 contact information, or otherwise explain what is going on.
2473
2474 set trace-stop-notes
2475 show trace-stop-notes
2476 Set a note attached to the trace run, that is displayed when the
2477 trace has been stopped by a tstop command. This is useful for
2478 instance as an explanation, if you are stopping a trace run that was
2479 started by someone else.
2480
2481 * New remote packets
2482
2483 QTEnable
2484
2485 Dynamically enable a tracepoint in a started trace experiment.
2486
2487 QTDisable
2488
2489 Dynamically disable a tracepoint in a started trace experiment.
2490
2491 QTNotes
2492
2493 Set the user and notes of the trace run.
2494
2495 qTP
2496
2497 Query the current status of a tracepoint.
2498
2499 qTMinFTPILen
2500
2501 Query the minimum length of instruction at which a fast tracepoint may
2502 be placed.
2503
2504 * Dcache size (number of lines) and line-size are now runtime-configurable
2505 via "set dcache line" and "set dcache line-size" commands.
2506
2507 * New targets
2508
2509 Texas Instruments TMS320C6x tic6x-*-*
2510
2511 * New Simulators
2512
2513 Renesas RL78 rl78-*-elf
2514
2515 *** Changes in GDB 7.3.1
2516
2517 * The build failure for NetBSD and OpenBSD targets have now been fixed.
2518
2519 *** Changes in GDB 7.3
2520
2521 * GDB has a new command: "thread find [REGEXP]".
2522 It finds the thread id whose name, target id, or thread extra info
2523 matches the given regular expression.
2524
2525 * The "catch syscall" command now works on mips*-linux* targets.
2526
2527 * The -data-disassemble MI command now supports modes 2 and 3 for
2528 dumping the instruction opcodes.
2529
2530 * New command line options
2531
2532 -data-directory DIR Specify DIR as the "data-directory".
2533 This is mostly for testing purposes.
2534
2535 * The "maint set python auto-load on|off" command has been renamed to
2536 "set auto-load-scripts on|off".
2537
2538 * GDB has a new command: "set directories".
2539 It is like the "dir" command except that it replaces the
2540 source path list instead of augmenting it.
2541
2542 * GDB now understands thread names.
2543
2544 On GNU/Linux, "info threads" will display the thread name as set by
2545 prctl or pthread_setname_np.
2546
2547 There is also a new command, "thread name", which can be used to
2548 assign a name internally for GDB to display.
2549
2550 * OpenCL C
2551 Initial support for the OpenCL C language (http://www.khronos.org/opencl)
2552 has been integrated into GDB.
2553
2554 * Python scripting
2555
2556 ** The function gdb.Write now accepts an optional keyword 'stream'.
2557 This keyword, when provided, will direct the output to either
2558 stdout, stderr, or GDB's logging output.
2559
2560 ** Parameters can now be be sub-classed in Python, and in particular
2561 you may implement the get_set_doc and get_show_doc functions.
2562 This improves how Parameter set/show documentation is processed
2563 and allows for more dynamic content.
2564
2565 ** Symbols, Symbol Table, Symbol Table and Line, Object Files,
2566 Inferior, Inferior Thread, Blocks, and Block Iterator APIs now
2567 have an is_valid method.
2568
2569 ** Breakpoints can now be sub-classed in Python, and in particular
2570 you may implement a 'stop' function that is executed each time
2571 the inferior reaches that breakpoint.
2572
2573 ** New function gdb.lookup_global_symbol looks up a global symbol.
2574
2575 ** GDB values in Python are now callable if the value represents a
2576 function. For example, if 'some_value' represents a function that
2577 takes two integer parameters and returns a value, you can call
2578 that function like so:
2579
2580 result = some_value (10,20)
2581
2582 ** Module gdb.types has been added.
2583 It contains a collection of utilities for working with gdb.Types objects:
2584 get_basic_type, has_field, make_enum_dict.
2585
2586 ** Module gdb.printing has been added.
2587 It contains utilities for writing and registering pretty-printers.
2588 New classes: PrettyPrinter, SubPrettyPrinter,
2589 RegexpCollectionPrettyPrinter.
2590 New function: register_pretty_printer.
2591
2592 ** New commands "info pretty-printers", "enable pretty-printer" and
2593 "disable pretty-printer" have been added.
2594
2595 ** gdb.parameter("directories") is now available.
2596
2597 ** New function gdb.newest_frame returns the newest frame in the
2598 selected thread.
2599
2600 ** The gdb.InferiorThread class has a new "name" attribute. This
2601 holds the thread's name.
2602
2603 ** Python Support for Inferior events.
2604 Python scripts can add observers to be notified of events
2605 occurring in the process being debugged.
2606 The following events are currently supported:
2607 - gdb.events.cont Continue event.
2608 - gdb.events.exited Inferior exited event.
2609 - gdb.events.stop Signal received, and Breakpoint hit events.
2610
2611 * C++ Improvements:
2612
2613 ** GDB now puts template parameters in scope when debugging in an
2614 instantiation. For example, if you have:
2615
2616 template<int X> int func (void) { return X; }
2617
2618 then if you step into func<5>, "print X" will show "5". This
2619 feature requires proper debuginfo support from the compiler; it
2620 was added to GCC 4.5.
2621
2622 ** The motion commands "next", "finish", "until", and "advance" now
2623 work better when exceptions are thrown. In particular, GDB will
2624 no longer lose control of the inferior; instead, the GDB will
2625 stop the inferior at the point at which the exception is caught.
2626 This functionality requires a change in the exception handling
2627 code that was introduced in GCC 4.5.
2628
2629 * GDB now follows GCC's rules on accessing volatile objects when
2630 reading or writing target state during expression evaluation.
2631 One notable difference to prior behavior is that "print x = 0"
2632 no longer generates a read of x; the value of the assignment is
2633 now always taken directly from the value being assigned.
2634
2635 * GDB now has some support for using labels in the program's source in
2636 linespecs. For instance, you can use "advance label" to continue
2637 execution to a label.
2638
2639 * GDB now has support for reading and writing a new .gdb_index
2640 section. This section holds a fast index of DWARF debugging
2641 information and can be used to greatly speed up GDB startup and
2642 operation. See the documentation for `save gdb-index' for details.
2643
2644 * The "watch" command now accepts an optional "-location" argument.
2645 When used, this causes GDB to watch the memory referred to by the
2646 expression. Such a watchpoint is never deleted due to it going out
2647 of scope.
2648
2649 * GDB now supports thread debugging of core dumps on GNU/Linux.
2650
2651 GDB now activates thread debugging using the libthread_db library
2652 when debugging GNU/Linux core dumps, similarly to when debugging
2653 live processes. As a result, when debugging a core dump file, GDB
2654 is now able to display pthread_t ids of threads. For example, "info
2655 threads" shows the same output as when debugging the process when it
2656 was live. In earlier releases, you'd see something like this:
2657
2658 (gdb) info threads
2659 * 1 LWP 6780 main () at main.c:10
2660
2661 While now you see this:
2662
2663 (gdb) info threads
2664 * 1 Thread 0x7f0f5712a700 (LWP 6780) main () at main.c:10
2665
2666 It is also now possible to inspect TLS variables when debugging core
2667 dumps.
2668
2669 When debugging a core dump generated on a machine other than the one
2670 used to run GDB, you may need to point GDB at the correct
2671 libthread_db library with the "set libthread-db-search-path"
2672 command. See the user manual for more details on this command.
2673
2674 * When natively debugging programs on PowerPC BookE processors running
2675 a Linux kernel version 2.6.34 or later, GDB supports ranged breakpoints,
2676 which stop execution of the inferior whenever it executes an instruction
2677 at any address within the specified range. See the "PowerPC Embedded"
2678 section in the user manual for more details.
2679
2680 * New features in the GDB remote stub, GDBserver
2681
2682 ** GDBserver is now supported on PowerPC LynxOS (versions 4.x and 5.x),
2683 and i686 LynxOS (version 5.x).
2684
2685 ** GDBserver is now supported on Blackfin Linux.
2686
2687 * New native configurations
2688
2689 ia64 HP-UX ia64-*-hpux*
2690
2691 * New targets:
2692
2693 Analog Devices, Inc. Blackfin Processor bfin-*
2694
2695 * Ada task switching is now supported on sparc-elf targets when
2696 debugging a program using the Ravenscar Profile. For more information,
2697 see the "Tasking Support when using the Ravenscar Profile" section
2698 in the GDB user manual.
2699
2700 * Guile support was removed.
2701
2702 * New features in the GNU simulator
2703
2704 ** The --map-info flag lists all known core mappings.
2705
2706 ** CFI flashes may be simulated via the "cfi" device.
2707
2708 *** Changes in GDB 7.2
2709
2710 * Shared library support for remote targets by default
2711
2712 When GDB is configured for a generic, non-OS specific target, like
2713 for example, --target=arm-eabi or one of the many *-*-elf targets,
2714 GDB now queries remote stubs for loaded shared libraries using the
2715 `qXfer:libraries:read' packet. Previously, shared library support
2716 was always disabled for such configurations.
2717
2718 * C++ Improvements:
2719
2720 ** Argument Dependent Lookup (ADL)
2721
2722 In C++ ADL lookup directs function search to the namespaces of its
2723 arguments even if the namespace has not been imported.
2724 For example:
2725 namespace A
2726 {
2727 class B { };
2728 void foo (B) { }
2729 }
2730 ...
2731 A::B b
2732 foo(b)
2733 Here the compiler will search for `foo' in the namespace of 'b'
2734 and find A::foo. GDB now supports this. This construct is commonly
2735 used in the Standard Template Library for operators.
2736
2737 ** Improved User Defined Operator Support
2738
2739 In addition to member operators, GDB now supports lookup of operators
2740 defined in a namespace and imported with a `using' directive, operators
2741 defined in the global scope, operators imported implicitly from an
2742 anonymous namespace, and the ADL operators mentioned in the previous
2743 entry.
2744 GDB now also supports proper overload resolution for all the previously
2745 mentioned flavors of operators.
2746
2747 ** static const class members
2748
2749 Printing of static const class members that are initialized in the
2750 class definition has been fixed.
2751
2752 * Windows Thread Information Block access.
2753
2754 On Windows targets, GDB now supports displaying the Windows Thread
2755 Information Block (TIB) structure. This structure is visible either
2756 by using the new command `info w32 thread-information-block' or, by
2757 dereferencing the new convenience variable named `$_tlb', a
2758 thread-specific pointer to the TIB. This feature is also supported
2759 when remote debugging using GDBserver.
2760
2761 * Static tracepoints
2762
2763 Static tracepoints are calls in the user program into a tracing
2764 library. One such library is a port of the LTTng kernel tracer to
2765 userspace --- UST (LTTng Userspace Tracer, http://lttng.org/ust).
2766 When debugging with GDBserver, GDB now supports combining the GDB
2767 tracepoint machinery with such libraries. For example: the user can
2768 use GDB to probe a static tracepoint marker (a call from the user
2769 program into the tracing library) with the new "strace" command (see
2770 "New commands" below). This creates a "static tracepoint" in the
2771 breakpoint list, that can be manipulated with the same feature set
2772 as fast and regular tracepoints. E.g., collect registers, local and
2773 global variables, collect trace state variables, and define
2774 tracepoint conditions. In addition, the user can collect extra
2775 static tracepoint marker specific data, by collecting the new
2776 $_sdata internal variable. When analyzing the trace buffer, you can
2777 inspect $_sdata like any other variable available to GDB. For more
2778 information, see the "Tracepoints" chapter in GDB user manual. New
2779 remote packets have been defined to support static tracepoints, see
2780 the "New remote packets" section below.
2781
2782 * Better reconstruction of tracepoints after disconnected tracing
2783
2784 GDB will attempt to download the original source form of tracepoint
2785 definitions when starting a trace run, and then will upload these
2786 upon reconnection to the target, resulting in a more accurate
2787 reconstruction of the tracepoints that are in use on the target.
2788
2789 * Observer mode
2790
2791 You can now exercise direct control over the ways that GDB can
2792 affect your program. For instance, you can disallow the setting of
2793 breakpoints, so that the program can run continuously (assuming
2794 non-stop mode). In addition, the "observer" variable is available
2795 to switch all of the different controls; in observer mode, GDB
2796 cannot affect the target's behavior at all, which is useful for
2797 tasks like diagnosing live systems in the field.
2798
2799 * The new convenience variable $_thread holds the number of the
2800 current thread.
2801
2802 * New remote packets
2803
2804 qGetTIBAddr
2805
2806 Return the address of the Windows Thread Information Block of a given thread.
2807
2808 qRelocInsn
2809
2810 In response to several of the tracepoint packets, the target may now
2811 also respond with a number of intermediate `qRelocInsn' request
2812 packets before the final result packet, to have GDB handle
2813 relocating an instruction to execute at a different address. This
2814 is particularly useful for stubs that support fast tracepoints. GDB
2815 reports support for this feature in the qSupported packet.
2816
2817 qTfSTM, qTsSTM
2818
2819 List static tracepoint markers in the target program.
2820
2821 qTSTMat
2822
2823 List static tracepoint markers at a given address in the target
2824 program.
2825
2826 qXfer:statictrace:read
2827
2828 Read the static trace data collected (by a `collect $_sdata'
2829 tracepoint action). The remote stub reports support for this packet
2830 to gdb's qSupported query.
2831
2832 QAllow
2833
2834 Send the current settings of GDB's permission flags.
2835
2836 QTDPsrc
2837
2838 Send part of the source (textual) form of a tracepoint definition,
2839 which includes location, conditional, and action list.
2840
2841 * The source command now accepts a -s option to force searching for the
2842 script in the source search path even if the script name specifies
2843 a directory.
2844
2845 * New features in the GDB remote stub, GDBserver
2846
2847 - GDBserver now support tracepoints (including fast tracepoints, and
2848 static tracepoints). The feature is currently supported by the
2849 i386-linux and amd64-linux builds. See the "Tracepoints support
2850 in gdbserver" section in the manual for more information.
2851
2852 GDBserver JIT compiles the tracepoint's conditional agent
2853 expression bytecode into native code whenever possible for low
2854 overhead dynamic tracepoints conditionals. For such tracepoints,
2855 an expression that examines program state is evaluated when the
2856 tracepoint is reached, in order to determine whether to capture
2857 trace data. If the condition is simple and false, processing the
2858 tracepoint finishes very quickly and no data is gathered.
2859
2860 GDBserver interfaces with the UST (LTTng Userspace Tracer) library
2861 for static tracepoints support.
2862
2863 - GDBserver now supports x86_64 Windows 64-bit debugging.
2864
2865 * GDB now sends xmlRegisters= in qSupported packet to indicate that
2866 it understands register description.
2867
2868 * The --batch flag now disables pagination and queries.
2869
2870 * X86 general purpose registers
2871
2872 GDB now supports reading/writing byte, word and double-word x86
2873 general purpose registers directly. This means you can use, say,
2874 $ah or $ax to refer, respectively, to the byte register AH and
2875 16-bit word register AX that are actually portions of the 32-bit
2876 register EAX or 64-bit register RAX.
2877
2878 * The `commands' command now accepts a range of breakpoints to modify.
2879 A plain `commands' following a command that creates multiple
2880 breakpoints affects all the breakpoints set by that command. This
2881 applies to breakpoints set by `rbreak', and also applies when a
2882 single `break' command creates multiple breakpoints (e.g.,
2883 breakpoints on overloaded c++ functions).
2884
2885 * The `rbreak' command now accepts a filename specification as part of
2886 its argument, limiting the functions selected by the regex to those
2887 in the specified file.
2888
2889 * Support for remote debugging Windows and SymbianOS shared libraries
2890 from Unix hosts has been improved. Non Windows GDB builds now can
2891 understand target reported file names that follow MS-DOS based file
2892 system semantics, such as file names that include drive letters and
2893 use the backslash character as directory separator. This makes it
2894 possible to transparently use the "set sysroot" and "set
2895 solib-search-path" on Unix hosts to point as host copies of the
2896 target's shared libraries. See the new command "set
2897 target-file-system-kind" described below, and the "Commands to
2898 specify files" section in the user manual for more information.
2899
2900 * New commands
2901
2902 eval template, expressions...
2903 Convert the values of one or more expressions under the control
2904 of the string template to a command line, and call it.
2905
2906 set target-file-system-kind unix|dos-based|auto
2907 show target-file-system-kind
2908 Set or show the assumed file system kind for target reported file
2909 names.
2910
2911 save breakpoints <filename>
2912 Save all current breakpoint definitions to a file suitable for use
2913 in a later debugging session. To read the saved breakpoint
2914 definitions, use the `source' command.
2915
2916 `save tracepoints' is a new alias for `save-tracepoints'. The latter
2917 is now deprecated.
2918
2919 info static-tracepoint-markers
2920 Display information about static tracepoint markers in the target.
2921
2922 strace FN | FILE:LINE | *ADDR | -m MARKER_ID
2923 Define a static tracepoint by probing a marker at the given
2924 function, line, address, or marker ID.
2925
2926 set observer on|off
2927 show observer
2928 Enable and disable observer mode.
2929
2930 set may-write-registers on|off
2931 set may-write-memory on|off
2932 set may-insert-breakpoints on|off
2933 set may-insert-tracepoints on|off
2934 set may-insert-fast-tracepoints on|off
2935 set may-interrupt on|off
2936 Set individual permissions for GDB effects on the target. Note that
2937 some of these settings can have undesirable or surprising
2938 consequences, particularly when changed in the middle of a session.
2939 For instance, disabling the writing of memory can prevent
2940 breakpoints from being inserted, cause single-stepping to fail, or
2941 even crash your program, if you disable after breakpoints have been
2942 inserted. However, GDB should not crash.
2943
2944 set record memory-query on|off
2945 show record memory-query
2946 Control whether to stop the inferior if memory changes caused
2947 by an instruction cannot be recorded.
2948
2949 * Changed commands
2950
2951 disassemble
2952 The disassemble command now supports "start,+length" form of two arguments.
2953
2954 * Python scripting
2955
2956 ** GDB now provides a new directory location, called the python directory,
2957 where Python scripts written for GDB can be installed. The location
2958 of that directory is <data-directory>/python, where <data-directory>
2959 is the GDB data directory. For more details, see section `Scripting
2960 GDB using Python' in the manual.
2961
2962 ** The GDB Python API now has access to breakpoints, symbols, symbol
2963 tables, program spaces, inferiors, threads and frame's code blocks.
2964 Additionally, GDB Parameters can now be created from the API, and
2965 manipulated via set/show in the CLI.
2966
2967 ** New functions gdb.target_charset, gdb.target_wide_charset,
2968 gdb.progspaces, gdb.current_progspace, and gdb.string_to_argv.
2969
2970 ** New exception gdb.GdbError.
2971
2972 ** Pretty-printers are now also looked up in the current program space.
2973
2974 ** Pretty-printers can now be individually enabled and disabled.
2975
2976 ** GDB now looks for names of Python scripts to auto-load in a
2977 special section named `.debug_gdb_scripts', in addition to looking
2978 for a OBJFILE-gdb.py script when OBJFILE is read by the debugger.
2979
2980 * Tracepoint actions were unified with breakpoint commands. In particular,
2981 there are no longer differences in "info break" output for breakpoints and
2982 tracepoints and the "commands" command can be used for both tracepoints and
2983 regular breakpoints.
2984
2985 * New targets
2986
2987 ARM Symbian arm*-*-symbianelf*
2988
2989 * D language support.
2990 GDB now supports debugging programs written in the D programming
2991 language.
2992
2993 * GDB now supports the extended ptrace interface for PowerPC which is
2994 available since Linux kernel version 2.6.34. This automatically enables
2995 any hardware breakpoints and additional hardware watchpoints available in
2996 the processor. The old ptrace interface exposes just one hardware
2997 watchpoint and no hardware breakpoints.
2998
2999 * GDB is now able to use the Data Value Compare (DVC) register available on
3000 embedded PowerPC processors to implement in hardware simple watchpoint
3001 conditions of the form:
3002
3003 watch ADDRESS|VARIABLE if ADDRESS|VARIABLE == CONSTANT EXPRESSION
3004
3005 This works in native GDB running on Linux kernels with the extended ptrace
3006 interface mentioned above.
3007
3008 *** Changes in GDB 7.1
3009
3010 * C++ Improvements
3011
3012 ** Namespace Support
3013
3014 GDB now supports importing of namespaces in C++. This enables the
3015 user to inspect variables from imported namespaces. Support for
3016 namepace aliasing has also been added. So, if a namespace is
3017 aliased in the current scope (e.g. namepace C=A; ) the user can
3018 print variables using the alias (e.g. (gdb) print C::x).
3019
3020 ** Bug Fixes
3021
3022 All known bugs relating to the printing of virtual base class were
3023 fixed. It is now possible to call overloaded static methods using a
3024 qualified name.
3025
3026 ** Cast Operators
3027
3028 The C++ cast operators static_cast<>, dynamic_cast<>, const_cast<>,
3029 and reinterpret_cast<> are now handled by the C++ expression parser.
3030
3031 * New targets
3032
3033 Xilinx MicroBlaze microblaze-*-*
3034 Renesas RX rx-*-elf
3035
3036 * New Simulators
3037
3038 Xilinx MicroBlaze microblaze
3039 Renesas RX rx
3040
3041 * Multi-program debugging.
3042
3043 GDB now has support for multi-program (a.k.a. multi-executable or
3044 multi-exec) debugging. This allows for debugging multiple inferiors
3045 simultaneously each running a different program under the same GDB
3046 session. See "Debugging Multiple Inferiors and Programs" in the
3047 manual for more information. This implied some user visible changes
3048 in the multi-inferior support. For example, "info inferiors" now
3049 lists inferiors that are not running yet or that have exited
3050 already. See also "New commands" and "New options" below.
3051
3052 * New tracing features
3053
3054 GDB's tracepoint facility now includes several new features:
3055
3056 ** Trace state variables
3057
3058 GDB tracepoints now include support for trace state variables, which
3059 are variables managed by the target agent during a tracing
3060 experiment. They are useful for tracepoints that trigger each
3061 other, so for instance one tracepoint can count hits in a variable,
3062 and then a second tracepoint has a condition that is true when the
3063 count reaches a particular value. Trace state variables share the
3064 $-syntax of GDB convenience variables, and can appear in both
3065 tracepoint actions and condition expressions. Use the "tvariable"
3066 command to create, and "info tvariables" to view; see "Trace State
3067 Variables" in the manual for more detail.
3068
3069 ** Fast tracepoints
3070
3071 GDB now includes an option for defining fast tracepoints, which
3072 targets may implement more efficiently, such as by installing a jump
3073 into the target agent rather than a trap instruction. The resulting
3074 speedup can be by two orders of magnitude or more, although the
3075 tradeoff is that some program locations on some target architectures
3076 might not allow fast tracepoint installation, for instance if the
3077 instruction to be replaced is shorter than the jump. To request a
3078 fast tracepoint, use the "ftrace" command, with syntax identical to
3079 the regular trace command.
3080
3081 ** Disconnected tracing
3082
3083 It is now possible to detach GDB from the target while it is running
3084 a trace experiment, then reconnect later to see how the experiment
3085 is going. In addition, a new variable disconnected-tracing lets you
3086 tell the target agent whether to continue running a trace if the
3087 connection is lost unexpectedly.
3088
3089 ** Trace files
3090
3091 GDB now has the ability to save the trace buffer into a file, and
3092 then use that file as a target, similarly to you can do with
3093 corefiles. You can select trace frames, print data that was
3094 collected in them, and use tstatus to display the state of the
3095 tracing run at the moment that it was saved. To create a trace
3096 file, use "tsave <filename>", and to use it, do "target tfile
3097 <name>".
3098
3099 ** Circular trace buffer
3100
3101 You can ask the target agent to handle the trace buffer as a
3102 circular buffer, discarding the oldest trace frames to make room for
3103 newer ones, by setting circular-trace-buffer to on. This feature may
3104 not be available for all target agents.
3105
3106 * Changed commands
3107
3108 disassemble
3109 The disassemble command, when invoked with two arguments, now requires
3110 the arguments to be comma-separated.
3111
3112 info variables
3113 The info variables command now displays variable definitions. Files
3114 which only declare a variable are not shown.
3115
3116 source
3117 The source command is now capable of sourcing Python scripts.
3118 This feature is dependent on the debugger being build with Python
3119 support.
3120
3121 Related to this enhancement is also the introduction of a new command
3122 "set script-extension" (see below).
3123
3124 * New commands (for set/show, see "New options" below)
3125
3126 record save [<FILENAME>]
3127 Save a file (in core file format) containing the process record
3128 execution log for replay debugging at a later time.
3129
3130 record restore <FILENAME>
3131 Restore the process record execution log that was saved at an
3132 earlier time, for replay debugging.
3133
3134 add-inferior [-copies <N>] [-exec <FILENAME>]
3135 Add a new inferior.
3136
3137 clone-inferior [-copies <N>] [ID]
3138 Make a new inferior ready to execute the same program another
3139 inferior has loaded.
3140
3141 remove-inferior ID
3142 Remove an inferior.
3143
3144 maint info program-spaces
3145 List the program spaces loaded into GDB.
3146
3147 set remote interrupt-sequence [Ctrl-C | BREAK | BREAK-g]
3148 show remote interrupt-sequence
3149 Allow the user to select one of ^C, a BREAK signal or BREAK-g
3150 as the sequence to the remote target in order to interrupt the execution.
3151 Ctrl-C is a default. Some system prefers BREAK which is high level of
3152 serial line for some certain time. Linux kernel prefers BREAK-g, a.k.a
3153 Magic SysRq g. It is BREAK signal and character 'g'.
3154
3155 set remote interrupt-on-connect [on | off]
3156 show remote interrupt-on-connect
3157 When interrupt-on-connect is ON, gdb sends interrupt-sequence to
3158 remote target when gdb connects to it. This is needed when you debug
3159 Linux kernel.
3160
3161 set remotebreak [on | off]
3162 show remotebreak
3163 Deprecated. Use "set/show remote interrupt-sequence" instead.
3164
3165 tvariable $NAME [ = EXP ]
3166 Create or modify a trace state variable.
3167
3168 info tvariables
3169 List trace state variables and their values.
3170
3171 delete tvariable $NAME ...
3172 Delete one or more trace state variables.
3173
3174 teval EXPR, ...
3175 Evaluate the given expressions without collecting anything into the
3176 trace buffer. (Valid in tracepoint actions only.)
3177
3178 ftrace FN / FILE:LINE / *ADDR
3179 Define a fast tracepoint at the given function, line, or address.
3180
3181 * New expression syntax
3182
3183 GDB now parses the 0b prefix of binary numbers the same way as GCC does.
3184 GDB now parses 0b101010 identically with 42.
3185
3186 * New options
3187
3188 set follow-exec-mode new|same
3189 show follow-exec-mode
3190 Control whether GDB reuses the same inferior across an exec call or
3191 creates a new one. This is useful to be able to restart the old
3192 executable after the inferior having done an exec call.
3193
3194 set default-collect EXPR, ...
3195 show default-collect
3196 Define a list of expressions to be collected at each tracepoint.
3197 This is a useful way to ensure essential items are not overlooked,
3198 such as registers or a critical global variable.
3199
3200 set disconnected-tracing
3201 show disconnected-tracing
3202 If set to 1, the target is instructed to continue tracing if it
3203 loses its connection to GDB. If 0, the target is to stop tracing
3204 upon disconnection.
3205
3206 set circular-trace-buffer
3207 show circular-trace-buffer
3208 If set to on, the target is instructed to use a circular trace buffer
3209 and discard the oldest trace frames instead of stopping the trace due
3210 to a full trace buffer. If set to off, the trace stops when the buffer
3211 fills up. Some targets may not support this.
3212
3213 set script-extension off|soft|strict
3214 show script-extension
3215 If set to "off", the debugger does not perform any script language
3216 recognition, and all sourced files are assumed to be GDB scripts.
3217 If set to "soft" (the default), files are sourced according to
3218 filename extension, falling back to GDB scripts if the first
3219 evaluation failed.
3220 If set to "strict", files are sourced according to filename extension.
3221
3222 set ada trust-PAD-over-XVS on|off
3223 show ada trust-PAD-over-XVS
3224 If off, activate a workaround against a bug in the debugging information
3225 generated by the compiler for PAD types (see gcc/exp_dbug.ads in
3226 the GCC sources for more information about the GNAT encoding and
3227 PAD types in particular). It is always safe to set this option to
3228 off, but this introduces a slight performance penalty. The default
3229 is on.
3230
3231 * Python API Improvements
3232
3233 ** GDB provides the new class gdb.LazyString. This is useful in
3234 some pretty-printing cases. The new method gdb.Value.lazy_string
3235 provides a simple way to create objects of this type.
3236
3237 ** The fields returned by gdb.Type.fields now have an
3238 `is_base_class' attribute.
3239
3240 ** The new method gdb.Type.range returns the range of an array type.
3241
3242 ** The new method gdb.parse_and_eval can be used to parse and
3243 evaluate an expression.
3244
3245 * New remote packets
3246
3247 QTDV
3248 Define a trace state variable.
3249
3250 qTV
3251 Get the current value of a trace state variable.
3252
3253 QTDisconnected
3254 Set desired tracing behavior upon disconnection.
3255
3256 QTBuffer:circular
3257 Set the trace buffer to be linear or circular.
3258
3259 qTfP, qTsP
3260 Get data about the tracepoints currently in use.
3261
3262 * Bug fixes
3263
3264 Process record now works correctly with hardware watchpoints.
3265
3266 Multiple bug fixes have been made to the mips-irix port, making it
3267 much more reliable. In particular:
3268 - Debugging threaded applications is now possible again. Previously,
3269 GDB would hang while starting the program, or while waiting for
3270 the program to stop at a breakpoint.
3271 - Attaching to a running process no longer hangs.
3272 - An error occurring while loading a core file has been fixed.
3273 - Changing the value of the PC register now works again. This fixes
3274 problems observed when using the "jump" command, or when calling
3275 a function from GDB, or even when assigning a new value to $pc.
3276 - With the "finish" and "return" commands, the return value for functions
3277 returning a small array is now correctly printed.
3278 - It is now possible to break on shared library code which gets executed
3279 during a shared library init phase (code executed while executing
3280 their .init section). Previously, the breakpoint would have no effect.
3281 - GDB is now able to backtrace through the signal handler for
3282 non-threaded programs.
3283
3284 PIE (Position Independent Executable) programs debugging is now supported.
3285 This includes debugging execution of PIC (Position Independent Code) shared
3286 libraries although for that, it should be possible to run such libraries as an
3287 executable program.
3288
3289 *** Changes in GDB 7.0
3290
3291 * GDB now has an interface for JIT compilation. Applications that
3292 dynamically generate code can create symbol files in memory and register
3293 them with GDB. For users, the feature should work transparently, and
3294 for JIT developers, the interface is documented in the GDB manual in the
3295 "JIT Compilation Interface" chapter.
3296
3297 * Tracepoints may now be conditional. The syntax is as for
3298 breakpoints; either an "if" clause appended to the "trace" command,
3299 or the "condition" command is available. GDB sends the condition to
3300 the target for evaluation using the same bytecode format as is used
3301 for tracepoint actions.
3302
3303 * The disassemble command now supports: an optional /r modifier, print the
3304 raw instructions in hex as well as in symbolic form, and an optional /m
3305 modifier to print mixed source+assembly.
3306
3307 * Process record and replay
3308
3309 In a architecture environment that supports ``process record and
3310 replay'', ``process record and replay'' target can record a log of
3311 the process execution, and replay it with both forward and reverse
3312 execute commands.
3313
3314 * Reverse debugging: GDB now has new commands reverse-continue, reverse-
3315 step, reverse-next, reverse-finish, reverse-stepi, reverse-nexti, and
3316 set execution-direction {forward|reverse}, for targets that support
3317 reverse execution.
3318
3319 * GDB now supports hardware watchpoints on MIPS/Linux systems. This
3320 feature is available with a native GDB running on kernel version
3321 2.6.28 or later.
3322
3323 * GDB now has support for multi-byte and wide character sets on the
3324 target. Strings whose character type is wchar_t, char16_t, or
3325 char32_t are now correctly printed. GDB supports wide- and unicode-
3326 literals in C, that is, L'x', L"string", u'x', u"string", U'x', and
3327 U"string" syntax. And, GDB allows the "%ls" and "%lc" formats in
3328 `printf'. This feature requires iconv to work properly; if your
3329 system does not have a working iconv, GDB can use GNU libiconv. See
3330 the installation instructions for more information.
3331
3332 * GDB now supports automatic retrieval of shared library files from
3333 remote targets. To use this feature, specify a system root that begins
3334 with the `remote:' prefix, either via the `set sysroot' command or via
3335 the `--with-sysroot' configure-time option.
3336
3337 * "info sharedlibrary" now takes an optional regex of libraries to show,
3338 and it now reports if a shared library has no debugging information.
3339
3340 * Commands `set debug-file-directory', `set solib-search-path' and `set args'
3341 now complete on file names.
3342
3343 * When completing in expressions, gdb will attempt to limit
3344 completions to allowable structure or union fields, where appropriate.
3345 For instance, consider:
3346
3347 # struct example { int f1; double f2; };
3348 # struct example variable;
3349 (gdb) p variable.
3350
3351 If the user types TAB at the end of this command line, the available
3352 completions will be "f1" and "f2".
3353
3354 * Inlined functions are now supported. They show up in backtraces, and
3355 the "step", "next", and "finish" commands handle them automatically.
3356
3357 * GDB now supports the token-splicing (##) and stringification (#)
3358 operators when expanding macros. It also supports variable-arity
3359 macros.
3360
3361 * GDB now supports inspecting extra signal information, exported by
3362 the new $_siginfo convenience variable. The feature is currently
3363 implemented on linux ARM, i386 and amd64.
3364
3365 * GDB can now display the VFP floating point registers and NEON vector
3366 registers on ARM targets. Both ARM GNU/Linux native GDB and gdbserver
3367 can provide these registers (requires Linux 2.6.30 or later). Remote
3368 and simulator targets may also provide them.
3369
3370 * New remote packets
3371
3372 qSearch:memory:
3373 Search memory for a sequence of bytes.
3374
3375 QStartNoAckMode
3376 Turn off `+'/`-' protocol acknowledgments to permit more efficient
3377 operation over reliable transport links. Use of this packet is
3378 controlled by the `set remote noack-packet' command.
3379
3380 vKill
3381 Kill the process with the specified process ID. Use this in preference
3382 to `k' when multiprocess protocol extensions are supported.
3383
3384 qXfer:osdata:read
3385 Obtains additional operating system information
3386
3387 qXfer:siginfo:read
3388 qXfer:siginfo:write
3389 Read or write additional signal information.
3390
3391 * Removed remote protocol undocumented extension
3392
3393 An undocumented extension to the remote protocol's `S' stop reply
3394 packet that permited the stub to pass a process id was removed.
3395 Remote servers should use the `T' stop reply packet instead.
3396
3397 * GDB now supports multiple function calling conventions according to the
3398 DWARF-2 DW_AT_calling_convention function attribute.
3399
3400 * The SH target utilizes the aforementioned change to distinguish between gcc
3401 and Renesas calling convention. It also adds the new CLI commands
3402 `set/show sh calling-convention'.
3403
3404 * GDB can now read compressed debug sections, as produced by GNU gold
3405 with the --compress-debug-sections=zlib flag.
3406
3407 * 64-bit core files are now supported on AIX.
3408
3409 * Thread switching is now supported on Tru64.
3410
3411 * Watchpoints can now be set on unreadable memory locations, e.g. addresses
3412 which will be allocated using malloc later in program execution.
3413
3414 * The qXfer:libraries:read remote procotol packet now allows passing a
3415 list of section offsets.
3416
3417 * On GNU/Linux, GDB can now attach to stopped processes. Several race
3418 conditions handling signals delivered during attach or thread creation
3419 have also been fixed.
3420
3421 * GDB now supports the use of DWARF boolean types for Ada's type Boolean.
3422 From the user's standpoint, all unqualified instances of True and False
3423 are treated as the standard definitions, regardless of context.
3424
3425 * GDB now parses C++ symbol and type names more flexibly. For
3426 example, given:
3427
3428 template<typename T> class C { };
3429 C<char const *> c;
3430
3431 GDB will now correctly handle all of:
3432
3433 ptype C<char const *>
3434 ptype C<char const*>
3435 ptype C<const char *>
3436 ptype C<const char*>
3437
3438 * New features in the GDB remote stub, gdbserver
3439
3440 - The "--wrapper" command-line argument tells gdbserver to use a
3441 wrapper program to launch programs for debugging.
3442
3443 - On PowerPC and S/390 targets, it is now possible to use a single
3444 gdbserver executable to debug both 32-bit and 64-bit programs.
3445 (This requires gdbserver itself to be built as a 64-bit executable.)
3446
3447 - gdbserver uses the new noack protocol mode for TCP connections to
3448 reduce communications latency, if also supported and enabled in GDB.
3449
3450 - Support for the sparc64-linux-gnu target is now included in
3451 gdbserver.
3452
3453 - The amd64-linux build of gdbserver now supports debugging both
3454 32-bit and 64-bit programs.
3455
3456 - The i386-linux, amd64-linux, and i386-win32 builds of gdbserver
3457 now support hardware watchpoints, and will use them automatically
3458 as appropriate.
3459
3460 * Python scripting
3461
3462 GDB now has support for scripting using Python. Whether this is
3463 available is determined at configure time.
3464
3465 New GDB commands can now be written in Python.
3466
3467 * Ada tasking support
3468
3469 Ada tasks can now be inspected in GDB. The following commands have
3470 been introduced:
3471
3472 info tasks
3473 Print the list of Ada tasks.
3474 info task N
3475 Print detailed information about task number N.
3476 task
3477 Print the task number of the current task.
3478 task N
3479 Switch the context of debugging to task number N.
3480
3481 * Support for user-defined prefixed commands. The "define" command can
3482 add new commands to existing prefixes, e.g. "target".
3483
3484 * Multi-inferior, multi-process debugging.
3485
3486 GDB now has generalized support for multi-inferior debugging. See
3487 "Debugging Multiple Inferiors" in the manual for more information.
3488 Although availability still depends on target support, the command
3489 set is more uniform now. The GNU/Linux specific multi-forks support
3490 has been migrated to this new framework. This implied some user
3491 visible changes; see "New commands" and also "Removed commands"
3492 below.
3493
3494 * Target descriptions can now describe the target OS ABI. See the
3495 "Target Description Format" section in the user manual for more
3496 information.
3497
3498 * Target descriptions can now describe "compatible" architectures
3499 to indicate that the target can execute applications for a different
3500 architecture in addition to those for the main target architecture.
3501 See the "Target Description Format" section in the user manual for
3502 more information.
3503
3504 * Multi-architecture debugging.
3505
3506 GDB now includes general supports for debugging applications on
3507 hybrid systems that use more than one single processor architecture
3508 at the same time. Each such hybrid architecture still requires
3509 specific support to be added. The only hybrid architecture supported
3510 in this version of GDB is the Cell Broadband Engine.
3511
3512 * GDB now supports integrated debugging of Cell/B.E. applications that
3513 use both the PPU and SPU architectures. To enable support for hybrid
3514 Cell/B.E. debugging, you need to configure GDB to support both the
3515 powerpc-linux or powerpc64-linux and the spu-elf targets, using the
3516 --enable-targets configure option.
3517
3518 * Non-stop mode debugging.
3519
3520 For some targets, GDB now supports an optional mode of operation in
3521 which you can examine stopped threads while other threads continue
3522 to execute freely. This is referred to as non-stop mode, with the
3523 old mode referred to as all-stop mode. See the "Non-Stop Mode"
3524 section in the user manual for more information.
3525
3526 To be able to support remote non-stop debugging, a remote stub needs
3527 to implement the non-stop mode remote protocol extensions, as
3528 described in the "Remote Non-Stop" section of the user manual. The
3529 GDB remote stub, gdbserver, has been adjusted to support these
3530 extensions on linux targets.
3531
3532 * New commands (for set/show, see "New options" below)
3533
3534 catch syscall [NAME(S) | NUMBER(S)]
3535 Catch system calls. Arguments, which should be names of system
3536 calls or their numbers, mean catch only those syscalls. Without
3537 arguments, every syscall will be caught. When the inferior issues
3538 any of the specified syscalls, GDB will stop and announce the system
3539 call, both when it is called and when its call returns. This
3540 feature is currently available with a native GDB running on the
3541 Linux Kernel, under the following architectures: x86, x86_64,
3542 PowerPC and PowerPC64.
3543
3544 find [/size-char] [/max-count] start-address, end-address|+search-space-size,
3545 val1 [, val2, ...]
3546 Search memory for a sequence of bytes.
3547
3548 maint set python print-stack
3549 maint show python print-stack
3550 Show a stack trace when an error is encountered in a Python script.
3551
3552 python [CODE]
3553 Invoke CODE by passing it to the Python interpreter.
3554
3555 macro define
3556 macro list
3557 macro undef
3558 These allow macros to be defined, undefined, and listed
3559 interactively.
3560
3561 info os processes
3562 Show operating system information about processes.
3563
3564 info inferiors
3565 List the inferiors currently under GDB's control.
3566
3567 inferior NUM
3568 Switch focus to inferior number NUM.
3569
3570 detach inferior NUM
3571 Detach from inferior number NUM.
3572
3573 kill inferior NUM
3574 Kill inferior number NUM.
3575
3576 * New options
3577
3578 set spu stop-on-load
3579 show spu stop-on-load
3580 Control whether to stop for new SPE threads during Cell/B.E. debugging.
3581
3582 set spu auto-flush-cache
3583 show spu auto-flush-cache
3584 Control whether to automatically flush the software-managed cache
3585 during Cell/B.E. debugging.
3586
3587 set sh calling-convention
3588 show sh calling-convention
3589 Control the calling convention used when calling SH target functions.
3590
3591 set debug timestamp
3592 show debug timestamp
3593 Control display of timestamps with GDB debugging output.
3594
3595 set disassemble-next-line
3596 show disassemble-next-line
3597 Control display of disassembled source lines or instructions when
3598 the debuggee stops.
3599
3600 set remote noack-packet
3601 show remote noack-packet
3602 Set/show the use of remote protocol QStartNoAckMode packet. See above
3603 under "New remote packets."
3604
3605 set remote query-attached-packet
3606 show remote query-attached-packet
3607 Control use of remote protocol `qAttached' (query-attached) packet.
3608
3609 set remote read-siginfo-object
3610 show remote read-siginfo-object
3611 Control use of remote protocol `qXfer:siginfo:read' (read-siginfo-object)
3612 packet.
3613
3614 set remote write-siginfo-object
3615 show remote write-siginfo-object
3616 Control use of remote protocol `qXfer:siginfo:write' (write-siginfo-object)
3617 packet.
3618
3619 set remote reverse-continue
3620 show remote reverse-continue
3621 Control use of remote protocol 'bc' (reverse-continue) packet.
3622
3623 set remote reverse-step
3624 show remote reverse-step
3625 Control use of remote protocol 'bs' (reverse-step) packet.
3626
3627 set displaced-stepping
3628 show displaced-stepping
3629 Control displaced stepping mode. Displaced stepping is a way to
3630 single-step over breakpoints without removing them from the debuggee.
3631 Also known as "out-of-line single-stepping".
3632
3633 set debug displaced
3634 show debug displaced
3635 Control display of debugging info for displaced stepping.
3636
3637 maint set internal-error
3638 maint show internal-error
3639 Control what GDB does when an internal error is detected.
3640
3641 maint set internal-warning
3642 maint show internal-warning
3643 Control what GDB does when an internal warning is detected.
3644
3645 set exec-wrapper
3646 show exec-wrapper
3647 unset exec-wrapper
3648 Use a wrapper program to launch programs for debugging.
3649
3650 set multiple-symbols (all|ask|cancel)
3651 show multiple-symbols
3652 The value of this variable can be changed to adjust the debugger behavior
3653 when an expression or a breakpoint location contains an ambiguous symbol
3654 name (an overloaded function name, for instance).
3655
3656 set breakpoint always-inserted
3657 show breakpoint always-inserted
3658 Keep breakpoints always inserted in the target, as opposed to inserting
3659 them when resuming the target, and removing them when the target stops.
3660 This option can improve debugger performance on slow remote targets.
3661
3662 set arm fallback-mode (arm|thumb|auto)
3663 show arm fallback-mode
3664 set arm force-mode (arm|thumb|auto)
3665 show arm force-mode
3666 These commands control how ARM GDB determines whether instructions
3667 are ARM or Thumb. The default for both settings is auto, which uses
3668 the current CPSR value for instructions without symbols; previous
3669 versions of GDB behaved as if "set arm fallback-mode arm".
3670
3671 set disable-randomization
3672 show disable-randomization
3673 Standalone programs run with the virtual address space randomization enabled
3674 by default on some platforms. This option keeps the addresses stable across
3675 multiple debugging sessions.
3676
3677 set non-stop
3678 show non-stop
3679 Control whether other threads are stopped or not when some thread hits
3680 a breakpoint.
3681
3682 set target-async
3683 show target-async
3684 Requests that asynchronous execution is enabled in the target, if available.
3685 In this case, it's possible to resume target in the background, and interact
3686 with GDB while the target is running. "show target-async" displays the
3687 current state of asynchronous execution of the target.
3688
3689 set target-wide-charset
3690 show target-wide-charset
3691 The target-wide-charset is the name of the character set that GDB
3692 uses when printing characters whose type is wchar_t.
3693
3694 set tcp auto-retry (on|off)
3695 show tcp auto-retry
3696 set tcp connect-timeout
3697 show tcp connect-timeout
3698 These commands allow GDB to retry failed TCP connections to a remote stub
3699 with a specified timeout period; this is useful if the stub is launched
3700 in parallel with GDB but may not be ready to accept connections immediately.
3701
3702 set libthread-db-search-path
3703 show libthread-db-search-path
3704 Control list of directories which GDB will search for appropriate
3705 libthread_db.
3706
3707 set schedule-multiple (on|off)
3708 show schedule-multiple
3709 Allow GDB to resume all threads of all processes or only threads of
3710 the current process.
3711
3712 set stack-cache
3713 show stack-cache
3714 Use more aggressive caching for accesses to the stack. This improves
3715 performance of remote debugging (particularly backtraces) without
3716 affecting correctness.
3717
3718 set interactive-mode (on|off|auto)
3719 show interactive-mode
3720 Control whether GDB runs in interactive mode (on) or not (off).
3721 When in interactive mode, GDB waits for the user to answer all
3722 queries. Otherwise, GDB does not wait and assumes the default
3723 answer. When set to auto (the default), GDB determines which
3724 mode to use based on the stdin settings.
3725
3726 * Removed commands
3727
3728 info forks
3729 For program forks, this is replaced by the new more generic `info
3730 inferiors' command. To list checkpoints, you can still use the
3731 `info checkpoints' command, which was an alias for the `info forks'
3732 command.
3733
3734 fork NUM
3735 Replaced by the new `inferior' command. To switch between
3736 checkpoints, you can still use the `restart' command, which was an
3737 alias for the `fork' command.
3738
3739 process PID
3740 This is removed, since some targets don't have a notion of
3741 processes. To switch between processes, you can still use the
3742 `inferior' command using GDB's own inferior number.
3743
3744 delete fork NUM
3745 For program forks, this is replaced by the new more generic `kill
3746 inferior' command. To delete a checkpoint, you can still use the
3747 `delete checkpoint' command, which was an alias for the `delete
3748 fork' command.
3749
3750 detach fork NUM
3751 For program forks, this is replaced by the new more generic `detach
3752 inferior' command. To detach a checkpoint, you can still use the
3753 `detach checkpoint' command, which was an alias for the `detach
3754 fork' command.
3755
3756 * New native configurations
3757
3758 x86/x86_64 Darwin i[34567]86-*-darwin*
3759
3760 x86_64 MinGW x86_64-*-mingw*
3761
3762 * New targets
3763
3764 Lattice Mico32 lm32-*
3765 x86 DICOS i[34567]86-*-dicos*
3766 x86_64 DICOS x86_64-*-dicos*
3767 S+core 3 score-*-*
3768
3769 * The GDB remote stub, gdbserver, now supports x86 Windows CE
3770 (mingw32ce) debugging.
3771
3772 * Removed commands
3773
3774 catch load
3775 catch unload
3776 These commands were actually not implemented on any target.
3777
3778 *** Changes in GDB 6.8
3779
3780 * New native configurations
3781
3782 NetBSD/hppa hppa*-*netbsd*
3783 Xtensa GNU/Linux xtensa*-*-linux*
3784
3785 * New targets
3786
3787 NetBSD/hppa hppa*-*-netbsd*
3788 Xtensa GNU/Lunux xtensa*-*-linux*
3789
3790 * Change in command line behavior -- corefiles vs. process ids.
3791
3792 When the '-p NUMBER' or '--pid NUMBER' options are used, and
3793 attaching to process NUMBER fails, GDB no longer attempts to open a
3794 core file named NUMBER. Attaching to a program using the -c option
3795 is no longer supported. Instead, use the '-p' or '--pid' options.
3796
3797 * GDB can now be built as a native debugger for debugging Windows x86
3798 (mingw32) Portable Executable (PE) programs.
3799
3800 * Pending breakpoints no longer change their number when their address
3801 is resolved.
3802
3803 * GDB now supports breakpoints with multiple locations,
3804 including breakpoints on C++ constructors, inside C++ templates,
3805 and in inlined functions.
3806
3807 * GDB's ability to debug optimized code has been improved. GDB more
3808 accurately identifies function bodies and lexical blocks that occupy
3809 more than one contiguous range of addresses.
3810
3811 * Target descriptions can now describe registers for PowerPC.
3812
3813 * The GDB remote stub, gdbserver, now supports the AltiVec and SPE
3814 registers on PowerPC targets.
3815
3816 * The GDB remote stub, gdbserver, now supports thread debugging on GNU/Linux
3817 targets even when the libthread_db library is not available.
3818
3819 * The GDB remote stub, gdbserver, now supports the new file transfer
3820 commands (remote put, remote get, and remote delete).
3821
3822 * The GDB remote stub, gdbserver, now supports run and attach in
3823 extended-remote mode.
3824
3825 * hppa*64*-*-hpux11* target broken
3826 The debugger is unable to start a program and fails with the following
3827 error: "Error trying to get information about dynamic linker".
3828 The gdb-6.7 release is also affected.
3829
3830 * GDB now supports the --enable-targets= configure option to allow
3831 building a single GDB executable that supports multiple remote
3832 target architectures.
3833
3834 * GDB now supports debugging C and C++ programs which use the
3835 Decimal Floating Point extension. In addition, the PowerPC target
3836 now has a set of pseudo-registers to inspect decimal float values
3837 stored in two consecutive float registers.
3838
3839 * The -break-insert MI command can optionally create pending
3840 breakpoints now.
3841
3842 * Improved support for debugging Ada
3843 Many improvements to the Ada language support have been made. These
3844 include:
3845 - Better support for Ada2005 interface types
3846 - Improved handling of arrays and slices in general
3847 - Better support for Taft-amendment types
3848 - The '{type} ADDRESS' expression is now allowed on the left hand-side
3849 of an assignment
3850 - Improved command completion in Ada
3851 - Several bug fixes
3852
3853 * GDB on GNU/Linux and HP/UX can now debug through "exec" of a new
3854 process.
3855
3856 * New commands
3857
3858 set print frame-arguments (all|scalars|none)
3859 show print frame-arguments
3860 The value of this variable can be changed to control which argument
3861 values should be printed by the debugger when displaying a frame.
3862
3863 remote put
3864 remote get
3865 remote delete
3866 Transfer files to and from a remote target, and delete remote files.
3867
3868 * New MI commands
3869
3870 -target-file-put
3871 -target-file-get
3872 -target-file-delete
3873 Transfer files to and from a remote target, and delete remote files.
3874
3875 * New remote packets
3876
3877 vFile:open:
3878 vFile:close:
3879 vFile:pread:
3880 vFile:pwrite:
3881 vFile:unlink:
3882 Open, close, read, write, and delete files on the remote system.
3883
3884 vAttach
3885 Attach to an existing process on the remote system, in extended-remote
3886 mode.
3887
3888 vRun
3889 Run a new process on the remote system, in extended-remote mode.
3890
3891 *** Changes in GDB 6.7
3892
3893 * Resolved 101 resource leaks, null pointer dereferences, etc. in gdb,
3894 bfd, libiberty and opcodes, as revealed by static analysis donated by
3895 Coverity, Inc. (http://scan.coverity.com).
3896
3897 * When looking up multiply-defined global symbols, GDB will now prefer the
3898 symbol definition in the current shared library if it was built using the
3899 -Bsymbolic linker option.
3900
3901 * When the Text User Interface (TUI) is not configured, GDB will now
3902 recognize the -tui command-line option and print a message that the TUI
3903 is not supported.
3904
3905 * The GDB remote stub, gdbserver, now has lower overhead for high
3906 frequency signals (e.g. SIGALRM) via the QPassSignals packet.
3907
3908 * GDB for MIPS targets now autodetects whether a remote target provides
3909 32-bit or 64-bit register values.
3910
3911 * Support for C++ member pointers has been improved.
3912
3913 * GDB now understands XML target descriptions, which specify the
3914 target's overall architecture. GDB can read a description from
3915 a local file or over the remote serial protocol.
3916
3917 * Vectors of single-byte data use a new integer type which is not
3918 automatically displayed as character or string data.
3919
3920 * The /s format now works with the print command. It displays
3921 arrays of single-byte integers and pointers to single-byte integers
3922 as strings.
3923
3924 * Target descriptions can now describe target-specific registers,
3925 for architectures which have implemented the support (currently
3926 only ARM, M68K, and MIPS).
3927
3928 * GDB and the GDB remote stub, gdbserver, now support the XScale
3929 iWMMXt coprocessor.
3930
3931 * The GDB remote stub, gdbserver, has been updated to support
3932 ARM Windows CE (mingw32ce) debugging, and GDB Windows CE support
3933 has been rewritten to use the standard GDB remote protocol.
3934
3935 * GDB can now step into C++ functions which are called through thunks.
3936
3937 * GDB for the Cell/B.E. SPU now supports overlay debugging.
3938
3939 * The GDB remote protocol "qOffsets" packet can now honor ELF segment
3940 layout. It also supports a TextSeg= and DataSeg= response when only
3941 segment base addresses (rather than offsets) are available.
3942
3943 * The /i format now outputs any trailing branch delay slot instructions
3944 immediately following the last instruction within the count specified.
3945
3946 * The GDB remote protocol "T" stop reply packet now supports a
3947 "library" response. Combined with the new "qXfer:libraries:read"
3948 packet, this response allows GDB to debug shared libraries on targets
3949 where the operating system manages the list of loaded libraries (e.g.
3950 Windows and SymbianOS).
3951
3952 * The GDB remote stub, gdbserver, now supports dynamic link libraries
3953 (DLLs) on Windows and Windows CE targets.
3954
3955 * GDB now supports a faster verification that a .debug file matches its binary
3956 according to its build-id signature, if the signature is present.
3957
3958 * New commands
3959
3960 set remoteflow
3961 show remoteflow
3962 Enable or disable hardware flow control (RTS/CTS) on the serial port
3963 when debugging using remote targets.
3964
3965 set mem inaccessible-by-default
3966 show mem inaccessible-by-default
3967 If the target supplies a memory map, for instance via the remote
3968 protocol's "qXfer:memory-map:read" packet, setting this variable
3969 prevents GDB from accessing memory outside the memory map. This
3970 is useful for targets with memory mapped registers or which react
3971 badly to accesses of unmapped address space.
3972
3973 set breakpoint auto-hw
3974 show breakpoint auto-hw
3975 If the target supplies a memory map, for instance via the remote
3976 protocol's "qXfer:memory-map:read" packet, setting this variable
3977 lets GDB use hardware breakpoints automatically for memory regions
3978 where it can not use software breakpoints. This covers both the
3979 "break" command and internal breakpoints used for other commands
3980 including "next" and "finish".
3981
3982 catch exception
3983 catch exception unhandled
3984 Stop the program execution when Ada exceptions are raised.
3985
3986 catch assert
3987 Stop the program execution when an Ada assertion failed.
3988
3989 set sysroot
3990 show sysroot
3991 Set an alternate system root for target files. This is a more
3992 general version of "set solib-absolute-prefix", which is now
3993 an alias to "set sysroot".
3994
3995 info spu
3996 Provide extended SPU facility status information. This set of
3997 commands is available only when debugging the Cell/B.E. SPU
3998 architecture.
3999
4000 * New native configurations
4001
4002 OpenBSD/sh sh*-*openbsd*
4003
4004 set tdesc filename
4005 unset tdesc filename
4006 show tdesc filename
4007 Use the specified local file as an XML target description, and do
4008 not query the target for its built-in description.
4009
4010 * New targets
4011
4012 OpenBSD/sh sh*-*-openbsd*
4013 MIPS64 GNU/Linux (gdbserver) mips64-linux-gnu
4014 Toshiba Media Processor mep-elf
4015
4016 * New remote packets
4017
4018 QPassSignals:
4019 Ignore the specified signals; pass them directly to the debugged program
4020 without stopping other threads or reporting them to GDB.
4021
4022 qXfer:features:read:
4023 Read an XML target description from the target, which describes its
4024 features.
4025
4026 qXfer:spu:read:
4027 qXfer:spu:write:
4028 Read or write contents of an spufs file on the target system. These
4029 packets are available only on the Cell/B.E. SPU architecture.
4030
4031 qXfer:libraries:read:
4032 Report the loaded shared libraries. Combined with new "T" packet
4033 response, this packet allows GDB to debug shared libraries on
4034 targets where the operating system manages the list of loaded
4035 libraries (e.g. Windows and SymbianOS).
4036
4037 * Removed targets
4038
4039 Support for these obsolete configurations has been removed.
4040
4041 alpha*-*-osf1*
4042 alpha*-*-osf2*
4043 d10v-*-*
4044 hppa*-*-hiux*
4045 i[34567]86-ncr-*
4046 i[34567]86-*-dgux*
4047 i[34567]86-*-lynxos*
4048 i[34567]86-*-netware*
4049 i[34567]86-*-sco3.2v5*
4050 i[34567]86-*-sco3.2v4*
4051 i[34567]86-*-sco*
4052 i[34567]86-*-sysv4.2*
4053 i[34567]86-*-sysv4*
4054 i[34567]86-*-sysv5*
4055 i[34567]86-*-unixware2*
4056 i[34567]86-*-unixware*
4057 i[34567]86-*-sysv*
4058 i[34567]86-*-isc*
4059 m68*-cisco*-*
4060 m68*-tandem-*
4061 mips*-*-pe
4062 rs6000-*-lynxos*
4063 sh*-*-pe
4064
4065 * Other removed features
4066
4067 target abug
4068 target cpu32bug
4069 target est
4070 target rom68k
4071
4072 Various m68k-only ROM monitors.
4073
4074 target hms
4075 target e7000
4076 target sh3
4077 target sh3e
4078
4079 Various Renesas ROM monitors and debugging interfaces for SH and
4080 H8/300.
4081
4082 target ocd
4083
4084 Support for a Macraigor serial interface to on-chip debugging.
4085 GDB does not directly support the newer parallel or USB
4086 interfaces.
4087
4088 DWARF 1 support
4089
4090 A debug information format. The predecessor to DWARF 2 and
4091 DWARF 3, which are still supported.
4092
4093 Support for the HP aCC compiler on HP-UX/PA-RISC
4094
4095 SOM-encapsulated symbolic debugging information, automatic
4096 invocation of pxdb, and the aCC custom C++ ABI. This does not
4097 affect HP-UX for Itanium or GCC for HP-UX/PA-RISC. Code compiled
4098 with aCC can still be debugged on an assembly level.
4099
4100 MIPS ".pdr" sections
4101
4102 A MIPS-specific format used to describe stack frame layout
4103 in debugging information.
4104
4105 Scheme support
4106
4107 GDB could work with an older version of Guile to debug
4108 the interpreter and Scheme programs running in it.
4109
4110 set mips stack-arg-size
4111 set mips saved-gpreg-size
4112
4113 Use "set mips abi" to control parameter passing for MIPS.
4114
4115 *** Changes in GDB 6.6
4116
4117 * New targets
4118
4119 Xtensa xtensa-elf
4120 Cell Broadband Engine SPU spu-elf
4121
4122 * GDB can now be configured as a cross-debugger targeting native Windows
4123 (mingw32) or Cygwin. It can communicate with a remote debugging stub
4124 running on a Windows system over TCP/IP to debug Windows programs.
4125
4126 * The GDB remote stub, gdbserver, has been updated to support Windows and
4127 Cygwin debugging. Both single-threaded and multi-threaded programs are
4128 supported.
4129
4130 * The "set trust-readonly-sections" command works again. This command was
4131 broken in GDB 6.3, 6.4, and 6.5.
4132
4133 * The "load" command now supports writing to flash memory, if the remote
4134 stub provides the required support.
4135
4136 * Support for GNU/Linux Thread Local Storage (TLS, per-thread variables) no
4137 longer requires symbolic debug information (e.g. DWARF-2).
4138
4139 * New commands
4140
4141 set substitute-path
4142 unset substitute-path
4143 show substitute-path
4144 Manage a list of substitution rules that GDB uses to rewrite the name
4145 of the directories where the sources are located. This can be useful
4146 for instance when the sources were moved to a different location
4147 between compilation and debugging.
4148
4149 set trace-commands
4150 show trace-commands
4151 Print each CLI command as it is executed. Each command is prefixed with
4152 a number of `+' symbols representing the nesting depth.
4153 The source command now has a `-v' option to enable the same feature.
4154
4155 * REMOVED features
4156
4157 The ARM Demon monitor support (RDP protocol, "target rdp").
4158
4159 Kernel Object Display, an embedded debugging feature which only worked with
4160 an obsolete version of Cisco IOS.
4161
4162 The 'set download-write-size' and 'show download-write-size' commands.
4163
4164 * New remote packets
4165
4166 qSupported:
4167 Tell a stub about GDB client features, and request remote target features.
4168 The first feature implemented is PacketSize, which allows the target to
4169 specify the size of packets it can handle - to minimize the number of
4170 packets required and improve performance when connected to a remote
4171 target.
4172
4173 qXfer:auxv:read:
4174 Fetch an OS auxilliary vector from the remote stub. This packet is a
4175 more efficient replacement for qPart:auxv:read.
4176
4177 qXfer:memory-map:read:
4178 Fetch a memory map from the remote stub, including information about
4179 RAM, ROM, and flash memory devices.
4180
4181 vFlashErase:
4182 vFlashWrite:
4183 vFlashDone:
4184 Erase and program a flash memory device.
4185
4186 * Removed remote packets
4187
4188 qPart:auxv:read:
4189 This packet has been replaced by qXfer:auxv:read. Only GDB 6.4 and 6.5
4190 used it, and only gdbserver implemented it.
4191
4192 *** Changes in GDB 6.5
4193
4194 * New targets
4195
4196 Renesas M32C/M16C m32c-elf
4197
4198 Morpho Technologies ms1 ms1-elf
4199
4200 * New commands
4201
4202 init-if-undefined Initialize a convenience variable, but
4203 only if it doesn't already have a value.
4204
4205 The following commands are presently only implemented for native GNU/Linux:
4206
4207 checkpoint Save a snapshot of the program state.
4208
4209 restart <n> Return the program state to a
4210 previously saved state.
4211
4212 info checkpoints List currently saved checkpoints.
4213
4214 delete-checkpoint <n> Delete a previously saved checkpoint.
4215
4216 set|show detach-on-fork Tell gdb whether to detach from a newly
4217 forked process, or to keep debugging it.
4218
4219 info forks List forks of the user program that
4220 are available to be debugged.
4221
4222 fork <n> Switch to debugging one of several
4223 forks of the user program that are
4224 available to be debugged.
4225
4226 delete-fork <n> Delete a fork from the list of forks
4227 that are available to be debugged (and
4228 kill the forked process).
4229
4230 detach-fork <n> Delete a fork from the list of forks
4231 that are available to be debugged (and
4232 allow the process to continue).
4233
4234 * New architecture
4235
4236 Morpho Technologies ms2 ms1-elf
4237
4238 * Improved Windows host support
4239
4240 GDB now builds as a cross debugger hosted on i686-mingw32, including
4241 native console support, and remote communications using either
4242 network sockets or serial ports.
4243
4244 * Improved Modula-2 language support
4245
4246 GDB can now print most types in the Modula-2 syntax. This includes:
4247 basic types, set types, record types, enumerated types, range types,
4248 pointer types and ARRAY types. Procedure var parameters are correctly
4249 printed and hexadecimal addresses and character constants are also
4250 written in the Modula-2 syntax. Best results can be obtained by using
4251 GNU Modula-2 together with the -gdwarf-2 command line option.
4252
4253 * REMOVED features
4254
4255 The ARM rdi-share module.
4256
4257 The Netware NLM debug server.
4258
4259 *** Changes in GDB 6.4
4260
4261 * New native configurations
4262
4263 OpenBSD/arm arm*-*-openbsd*
4264 OpenBSD/mips64 mips64-*-openbsd*
4265
4266 * New targets
4267
4268 Morpho Technologies ms1 ms1-elf
4269
4270 * New command line options
4271
4272 --batch-silent As for --batch, but totally silent.
4273 --return-child-result The debugger will exist with the same value
4274 the child (debugged) program exited with.
4275 --eval-command COMMAND, -ex COMMAND
4276 Execute a single GDB CLI command. This may be
4277 specified multiple times and in conjunction
4278 with the --command (-x) option.
4279
4280 * Deprecated commands removed
4281
4282 The following commands, that were deprecated in 2000, have been
4283 removed:
4284
4285 Command Replacement
4286 set|show arm disassembly-flavor set|show arm disassembler
4287 othernames set arm disassembler
4288 set|show remotedebug set|show debug remote
4289 set|show archdebug set|show debug arch
4290 set|show eventdebug set|show debug event
4291 regs info registers
4292
4293 * New BSD user-level threads support
4294
4295 It is now possible to debug programs using the user-level threads
4296 library on OpenBSD and FreeBSD. Currently supported (target)
4297 configurations are:
4298
4299 FreeBSD/amd64 x86_64-*-freebsd*
4300 FreeBSD/i386 i386-*-freebsd*
4301 OpenBSD/i386 i386-*-openbsd*
4302
4303 Note that the new kernel threads libraries introduced in FreeBSD 5.x
4304 are not yet supported.
4305
4306 * New support for Matsushita MN10300 w/sim added
4307 (Work in progress). mn10300-elf.
4308
4309 * REMOVED configurations and files
4310
4311 VxWorks and the XDR protocol *-*-vxworks
4312 Motorola MCORE mcore-*-*
4313 National Semiconductor NS32000 ns32k-*-*
4314
4315 * New "set print array-indexes" command
4316
4317 After turning this setting "on", GDB prints the index of each element
4318 when displaying arrays. The default is "off" to preserve the previous
4319 behavior.
4320
4321 * VAX floating point support
4322
4323 GDB now supports the not-quite-ieee VAX F and D floating point formats.
4324
4325 * User-defined command support
4326
4327 In addition to using $arg0..$arg9 for argument passing, it is now possible
4328 to use $argc to determine now many arguments have been passed. See the
4329 section on user-defined commands in the user manual for more information.
4330
4331 *** Changes in GDB 6.3:
4332
4333 * New command line option
4334
4335 GDB now accepts -l followed by a number to set the timeout for remote
4336 debugging.
4337
4338 * GDB works with GCC -feliminate-dwarf2-dups
4339
4340 GDB now supports a more compact representation of DWARF-2 debug
4341 information using DW_FORM_ref_addr references. These are produced
4342 by GCC with the option -feliminate-dwarf2-dups and also by some
4343 proprietary compilers. With GCC, you must use GCC 3.3.4 or later
4344 to use -feliminate-dwarf2-dups.
4345
4346 * Internationalization
4347
4348 When supported by the host system, GDB will be built with
4349 internationalization (libintl). The task of marking up the sources is
4350 continued, we're looking forward to our first translation.
4351
4352 * Ada
4353
4354 Initial support for debugging programs compiled with the GNAT
4355 implementation of the Ada programming language has been integrated
4356 into GDB. In this release, support is limited to expression evaluation.
4357
4358 * New native configurations
4359
4360 GNU/Linux/m32r m32r-*-linux-gnu
4361
4362 * Remote 'p' packet
4363
4364 GDB's remote protocol now includes support for the 'p' packet. This
4365 packet is used to fetch individual registers from a remote inferior.
4366
4367 * END-OF-LIFE registers[] compatibility module
4368
4369 GDB's internal register infrastructure has been completely rewritten.
4370 The new infrastructure making possible the implementation of key new
4371 features including 32x64 (e.g., 64-bit amd64 GDB debugging a 32-bit
4372 i386 application).
4373
4374 GDB 6.3 will be the last release to include the the registers[]
4375 compatibility module that allowed out-of-date configurations to
4376 continue to work. This change directly impacts the following
4377 configurations:
4378
4379 hppa-*-hpux
4380 ia64-*-aix
4381 mips-*-irix*
4382 *-*-lynx
4383 mips-*-linux-gnu
4384 sds protocol
4385 xdr protocol
4386 powerpc bdm protocol
4387
4388 Unless there is activity to revive these configurations, they will be
4389 made OBSOLETE in GDB 6.4, and REMOVED from GDB 6.5.
4390
4391 * OBSOLETE configurations and files
4392
4393 Configurations that have been declared obsolete in this release have
4394 been commented out. Unless there is activity to revive these
4395 configurations, the next release of GDB will have their sources
4396 permanently REMOVED.
4397
4398 h8300-*-*
4399 mcore-*-*
4400 mn10300-*-*
4401 ns32k-*-*
4402 sh64-*-*
4403 v850-*-*
4404
4405 *** Changes in GDB 6.2.1:
4406
4407 * MIPS `break main; run' gave an heuristic-fence-post warning
4408
4409 When attempting to run even a simple program, a warning about
4410 heuristic-fence-post being hit would be reported. This problem has
4411 been fixed.
4412
4413 * MIPS IRIX 'long double' crashed GDB
4414
4415 When examining a long double variable, GDB would get a segmentation
4416 fault. The crash has been fixed (but GDB 6.2 cannot correctly examine
4417 IRIX long double values).
4418
4419 * VAX and "next"
4420
4421 A bug in the VAX stack code was causing problems with the "next"
4422 command. This problem has been fixed.
4423
4424 *** Changes in GDB 6.2:
4425
4426 * Fix for ``many threads''
4427
4428 On GNU/Linux systems that use the NPTL threads library, a program
4429 rapidly creating and deleting threads would confuse GDB leading to the
4430 error message:
4431
4432 ptrace: No such process.
4433 thread_db_get_info: cannot get thread info: generic error
4434
4435 This problem has been fixed.
4436
4437 * "-async" and "-noasync" options removed.
4438
4439 Support for the broken "-noasync" option has been removed (it caused
4440 GDB to dump core).
4441
4442 * New ``start'' command.
4443
4444 This command runs the program until the begining of the main procedure.
4445
4446 * New BSD Kernel Data Access Library (libkvm) interface
4447
4448 Using ``target kvm'' it is now possible to debug kernel core dumps and
4449 live kernel memory images on various FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD
4450 platforms. Currently supported (native-only) configurations are:
4451
4452 FreeBSD/amd64 x86_64-*-freebsd*
4453 FreeBSD/i386 i?86-*-freebsd*
4454 NetBSD/i386 i?86-*-netbsd*
4455 NetBSD/m68k m68*-*-netbsd*
4456 NetBSD/sparc sparc-*-netbsd*
4457 OpenBSD/amd64 x86_64-*-openbsd*
4458 OpenBSD/i386 i?86-*-openbsd*
4459 OpenBSD/m68k m68*-openbsd*
4460 OpenBSD/sparc sparc-*-openbsd*
4461
4462 * Signal trampoline code overhauled
4463
4464 Many generic problems with GDB's signal handling code have been fixed.
4465 These include: backtraces through non-contiguous stacks; recognition
4466 of sa_sigaction signal trampolines; backtrace from a NULL pointer
4467 call; backtrace through a signal trampoline; step into and out of
4468 signal handlers; and single-stepping in the signal trampoline.
4469
4470 Please note that kernel bugs are a limiting factor here. These
4471 features have been shown to work on an s390 GNU/Linux system that
4472 include a 2.6.8-rc1 kernel. Ref PR breakpoints/1702.
4473
4474 * Cygwin support for DWARF 2 added.
4475
4476 * New native configurations
4477
4478 GNU/Linux/hppa hppa*-*-linux*
4479 OpenBSD/hppa hppa*-*-openbsd*
4480 OpenBSD/m68k m68*-*-openbsd*
4481 OpenBSD/m88k m88*-*-openbsd*
4482 OpenBSD/powerpc powerpc-*-openbsd*
4483 NetBSD/vax vax-*-netbsd*
4484 OpenBSD/vax vax-*-openbsd*
4485
4486 * END-OF-LIFE frame compatibility module
4487
4488 GDB's internal frame infrastructure has been completely rewritten.
4489 The new infrastructure making it possible to support key new features
4490 including DWARF 2 Call Frame Information. To aid in the task of
4491 migrating old configurations to this new infrastructure, a
4492 compatibility module, that allowed old configurations to continue to
4493 work, was also included.
4494
4495 GDB 6.2 will be the last release to include this frame compatibility
4496 module. This change directly impacts the following configurations:
4497
4498 h8300-*-*
4499 mcore-*-*
4500 mn10300-*-*
4501 ns32k-*-*
4502 sh64-*-*
4503 v850-*-*
4504 xstormy16-*-*
4505
4506 Unless there is activity to revive these configurations, they will be
4507 made OBSOLETE in GDB 6.3, and REMOVED from GDB 6.4.
4508
4509 * REMOVED configurations and files
4510
4511 Sun 3, running SunOS 3 m68*-*-sunos3*
4512 Sun 3, running SunOS 4 m68*-*-sunos4*
4513 Sun 2, running SunOS 3 m68000-*-sunos3*
4514 Sun 2, running SunOS 4 m68000-*-sunos4*
4515 Motorola 680x0 running LynxOS m68*-*-lynxos*
4516 AT&T 3b1/Unix pc m68*-att-*
4517 Bull DPX2 (68k, System V release 3) m68*-bull-sysv*
4518 decstation mips-dec-* mips-little-*
4519 riscos mips-*-riscos* mips-*-sysv*
4520 sonymips mips-sony-*
4521 sysv mips*-*-sysv4* (IRIX 5/6 not included)
4522
4523 *** Changes in GDB 6.1.1:
4524
4525 * TUI (Text-mode User Interface) built-in (also included in GDB 6.1)
4526
4527 The TUI (Text-mode User Interface) is now built as part of a default
4528 GDB configuration. It is enabled by either selecting the TUI with the
4529 command line option "-i=tui" or by running the separate "gdbtui"
4530 program. For more information on the TUI, see the manual "Debugging
4531 with GDB".
4532
4533 * Pending breakpoint support (also included in GDB 6.1)
4534
4535 Support has been added to allow you to specify breakpoints in shared
4536 libraries that have not yet been loaded. If a breakpoint location
4537 cannot be found, and the "breakpoint pending" option is set to auto,
4538 GDB queries you if you wish to make the breakpoint pending on a future
4539 shared-library load. If and when GDB resolves the breakpoint symbol,
4540 the pending breakpoint is removed as one or more regular breakpoints
4541 are created.
4542
4543 Pending breakpoints are very useful for GCJ Java debugging.
4544
4545 * Fixed ISO-C build problems
4546
4547 The files bfd/elf-bfd.h, gdb/dictionary.c and gdb/types.c contained
4548 non ISO-C code that stopped them being built using a more strict ISO-C
4549 compiler (e.g., IBM's C compiler).
4550
4551 * Fixed build problem on IRIX 5
4552
4553 Due to header problems with <sys/proc.h>, the file gdb/proc-api.c
4554 wasn't able to compile compile on an IRIX 5 system.
4555
4556 * Added execute permission to gdb/gdbserver/configure
4557
4558 The shell script gdb/testsuite/gdb.stabs/configure lacked execute
4559 permission. This bug would cause configure to fail on a number of
4560 systems (Solaris, IRIX). Ref: server/519.
4561
4562 * Fixed build problem on hpux2.0w-hp-hpux11.00 using the HP ANSI C compiler
4563
4564 Older HPUX ANSI C compilers did not accept variable array sizes. somsolib.c
4565 has been updated to use constant array sizes.
4566
4567 * Fixed a panic in the DWARF Call Frame Info code on Solaris 2.7
4568
4569 GCC 3.3.2, on Solaris 2.7, includes the DW_EH_PE_funcrel encoding in
4570 its generated DWARF Call Frame Info. This encoding was causing GDB to
4571 panic, that panic has been fixed. Ref: gdb/1628.
4572
4573 * Fixed a problem when examining parameters in shared library code.
4574
4575 When examining parameters in optimized shared library code generated
4576 by a mainline GCC, GDB would incorrectly report ``Variable "..." is
4577 not available''. GDB now correctly displays the variable's value.
4578
4579 *** Changes in GDB 6.1:
4580
4581 * Removed --with-mmalloc
4582
4583 Support for the mmalloc memory manager has been removed, as it
4584 conflicted with the internal gdb byte cache.
4585
4586 * Changes in AMD64 configurations
4587
4588 The AMD64 target now includes the %cs and %ss registers. As a result
4589 the AMD64 remote protocol has changed; this affects the floating-point
4590 and SSE registers. If you rely on those registers for your debugging,
4591 you should upgrade gdbserver on the remote side.
4592
4593 * Revised SPARC target
4594
4595 The SPARC target has been completely revised, incorporating the
4596 FreeBSD/sparc64 support that was added for GDB 6.0. As a result
4597 support for LynxOS and SunOS 4 has been dropped. Calling functions
4598 from within GDB on operating systems with a non-executable stack
4599 (Solaris, OpenBSD) now works.
4600
4601 * New C++ demangler
4602
4603 GDB has a new C++ demangler which does a better job on the mangled
4604 names generated by current versions of g++. It also runs faster, so
4605 with this and other changes gdb should now start faster on large C++
4606 programs.
4607
4608 * DWARF 2 Location Expressions
4609
4610 GDB support for location expressions has been extended to support function
4611 arguments and frame bases. Older versions of GDB could crash when they
4612 encountered these.
4613
4614 * C++ nested types and namespaces
4615
4616 GDB's support for nested types and namespaces in C++ has been
4617 improved, especially if you use the DWARF 2 debugging format. (This
4618 is the default for recent versions of GCC on most platforms.)
4619 Specifically, if you have a class "Inner" defined within a class or
4620 namespace "Outer", then GDB realizes that the class's name is
4621 "Outer::Inner", not simply "Inner". This should greatly reduce the
4622 frequency of complaints about not finding RTTI symbols. In addition,
4623 if you are stopped at inside of a function defined within a namespace,
4624 GDB modifies its name lookup accordingly.
4625
4626 * New native configurations
4627
4628 NetBSD/amd64 x86_64-*-netbsd*
4629 OpenBSD/amd64 x86_64-*-openbsd*
4630 OpenBSD/alpha alpha*-*-openbsd*
4631 OpenBSD/sparc sparc-*-openbsd*
4632 OpenBSD/sparc64 sparc64-*-openbsd*
4633
4634 * New debugging protocols
4635
4636 M32R with SDI protocol m32r-*-elf*
4637
4638 * "set prompt-escape-char" command deleted.
4639
4640 The command "set prompt-escape-char" has been deleted. This command,
4641 and its very obscure effet on GDB's prompt, was never documented,
4642 tested, nor mentioned in the NEWS file.
4643
4644 * OBSOLETE configurations and files
4645
4646 Configurations that have been declared obsolete in this release have
4647 been commented out. Unless there is activity to revive these
4648 configurations, the next release of GDB will have their sources
4649 permanently REMOVED.
4650
4651 Sun 3, running SunOS 3 m68*-*-sunos3*
4652 Sun 3, running SunOS 4 m68*-*-sunos4*
4653 Sun 2, running SunOS 3 m68000-*-sunos3*
4654 Sun 2, running SunOS 4 m68000-*-sunos4*
4655 Motorola 680x0 running LynxOS m68*-*-lynxos*
4656 AT&T 3b1/Unix pc m68*-att-*
4657 Bull DPX2 (68k, System V release 3) m68*-bull-sysv*
4658 decstation mips-dec-* mips-little-*
4659 riscos mips-*-riscos* mips-*-sysv*
4660 sonymips mips-sony-*
4661 sysv mips*-*-sysv4* (IRIX 5/6 not included)
4662
4663 * REMOVED configurations and files
4664
4665 SGI Irix-4.x mips-sgi-irix4 or iris4
4666 SGI Iris (MIPS) running Irix V3: mips-sgi-irix or iris
4667 Z8000 simulator z8k-zilog-none or z8ksim
4668 Matsushita MN10200 w/simulator mn10200-*-*
4669 H8/500 simulator h8500-hitachi-hms or h8500hms
4670 HP/PA running BSD hppa*-*-bsd*
4671 HP/PA running OSF/1 hppa*-*-osf*
4672 HP/PA Pro target hppa*-*-pro*
4673 PMAX (MIPS) running Mach 3.0 mips*-*-mach3*
4674 386BSD i[3456]86-*-bsd*
4675 Sequent family i[3456]86-sequent-sysv4*
4676 i[3456]86-sequent-sysv*
4677 i[3456]86-sequent-bsd*
4678 SPARC running LynxOS sparc-*-lynxos*
4679 SPARC running SunOS 4 sparc-*-sunos4*
4680 Tsqware Sparclet sparclet-*-*
4681 Fujitsu SPARClite sparclite-fujitsu-none or sparclite
4682
4683 *** Changes in GDB 6.0:
4684
4685 * Objective-C
4686
4687 Support for debugging the Objective-C programming language has been
4688 integrated into GDB.
4689
4690 * New backtrace mechanism (includes DWARF 2 Call Frame Information).
4691
4692 DWARF 2's Call Frame Information makes available compiler generated
4693 information that more exactly describes the program's run-time stack.
4694 By using this information, GDB is able to provide more robust stack
4695 backtraces.
4696
4697 The i386, amd64 (nee, x86-64), Alpha, m68hc11, ia64, and m32r targets
4698 have been updated to use a new backtrace mechanism which includes
4699 DWARF 2 CFI support.
4700
4701 * Hosted file I/O.
4702
4703 GDB's remote protocol has been extended to include support for hosted
4704 file I/O (where the remote target uses GDB's file system). See GDB's
4705 remote protocol documentation for details.
4706
4707 * All targets using the new architecture framework.
4708
4709 All of GDB's targets have been updated to use the new internal
4710 architecture framework. The way is now open for future GDB releases
4711 to include cross-architecture native debugging support (i386 on amd64,
4712 ppc32 on ppc64).
4713
4714 * GNU/Linux's Thread Local Storage (TLS)
4715
4716 GDB now includes support for for the GNU/Linux implementation of
4717 per-thread variables.
4718
4719 * GNU/Linux's Native POSIX Thread Library (NPTL)
4720
4721 GDB's thread code has been updated to work with either the new
4722 GNU/Linux NPTL thread library or the older "LinuxThreads" library.
4723
4724 * Separate debug info.
4725
4726 GDB, in conjunction with BINUTILS, now supports a mechanism for
4727 automatically loading debug information from a separate file. Instead
4728 of shipping full debug and non-debug versions of system libraries,
4729 system integrators can now instead ship just the stripped libraries
4730 and optional debug files.
4731
4732 * DWARF 2 Location Expressions
4733
4734 DWARF 2 Location Expressions allow the compiler to more completely
4735 describe the location of variables (even in optimized code) to the
4736 debugger.
4737
4738 GDB now includes preliminary support for location expressions (support
4739 for DW_OP_piece is still missing).
4740
4741 * Java
4742
4743 A number of long standing bugs that caused GDB to die while starting a
4744 Java application have been fixed. GDB's Java support is now
4745 considered "useable".
4746
4747 * GNU/Linux support for fork, vfork, and exec.
4748
4749 The "catch fork", "catch exec", "catch vfork", and "set follow-fork-mode"
4750 commands are now implemented for GNU/Linux. They require a 2.5.x or later
4751 kernel.
4752
4753 * GDB supports logging output to a file
4754
4755 There are two new commands, "set logging" and "show logging", which can be
4756 used to capture GDB's output to a file.
4757
4758 * The meaning of "detach" has changed for gdbserver
4759
4760 The "detach" command will now resume the application, as documented. To
4761 disconnect from gdbserver and leave it stopped, use the new "disconnect"
4762 command.
4763
4764 * d10v, m68hc11 `regs' command deprecated
4765
4766 The `info registers' command has been updated so that it displays the
4767 registers using a format identical to the old `regs' command.
4768
4769 * Profiling support
4770
4771 A new command, "maint set profile on/off", has been added. This command can
4772 be used to enable or disable profiling while running GDB, to profile a
4773 session or a set of commands. In addition there is a new configure switch,
4774 "--enable-profiling", which will cause GDB to be compiled with profiling
4775 data, for more informative profiling results.
4776
4777 * Default MI syntax changed to "mi2".
4778
4779 The default MI (machine interface) syntax, enabled by the command line
4780 option "-i=mi", has been changed to "mi2". The previous MI syntax,
4781 "mi1", can be enabled by specifying the option "-i=mi1".
4782
4783 Support for the original "mi0" syntax (included in GDB 5.0) has been
4784 removed.
4785
4786 Fix for gdb/192: removed extraneous space when displaying frame level.
4787 Fix for gdb/672: update changelist is now output in mi list format.
4788 Fix for gdb/702: a -var-assign that updates the value now shows up
4789 in a subsequent -var-update.
4790
4791 * New native configurations.
4792
4793 FreeBSD/amd64 x86_64-*-freebsd*
4794
4795 * Multi-arched targets.
4796
4797 HP/PA HPUX11 hppa*-*-hpux*
4798 Renesas M32R/D w/simulator m32r-*-elf*
4799
4800 * OBSOLETE configurations and files
4801
4802 Configurations that have been declared obsolete in this release have
4803 been commented out. Unless there is activity to revive these
4804 configurations, the next release of GDB will have their sources
4805 permanently REMOVED.
4806
4807 Z8000 simulator z8k-zilog-none or z8ksim
4808 Matsushita MN10200 w/simulator mn10200-*-*
4809 H8/500 simulator h8500-hitachi-hms or h8500hms
4810 HP/PA running BSD hppa*-*-bsd*
4811 HP/PA running OSF/1 hppa*-*-osf*
4812 HP/PA Pro target hppa*-*-pro*
4813 PMAX (MIPS) running Mach 3.0 mips*-*-mach3*
4814 Sequent family i[3456]86-sequent-sysv4*
4815 i[3456]86-sequent-sysv*
4816 i[3456]86-sequent-bsd*
4817 Tsqware Sparclet sparclet-*-*
4818 Fujitsu SPARClite sparclite-fujitsu-none or sparclite
4819
4820 * REMOVED configurations and files
4821
4822 V850EA ISA
4823 Motorola Delta 88000 running Sys V m88k-motorola-sysv or delta88
4824 IBM AIX PS/2 i[3456]86-*-aix
4825 i386 running Mach 3.0 i[3456]86-*-mach3*
4826 i386 running Mach i[3456]86-*-mach*
4827 i386 running OSF/1 i[3456]86-*osf1mk*
4828 HP/Apollo 68k Family m68*-apollo*-sysv*,
4829 m68*-apollo*-bsd*,
4830 m68*-hp-bsd*, m68*-hp-hpux*
4831 Argonaut Risc Chip (ARC) arc-*-*
4832 Mitsubishi D30V d30v-*-*
4833 Fujitsu FR30 fr30-*-elf*
4834 OS/9000 i[34]86-*-os9k
4835 I960 with MON960 i960-*-coff
4836
4837 * MIPS $fp behavior changed
4838
4839 The convenience variable $fp, for the MIPS, now consistently returns
4840 the address of the current frame's base. Previously, depending on the
4841 context, $fp could refer to either $sp or the current frame's base
4842 address. See ``8.10 Registers'' in the manual ``Debugging with GDB:
4843 The GNU Source-Level Debugger''.
4844
4845 *** Changes in GDB 5.3:
4846
4847 * GNU/Linux shared library multi-threaded performance improved.
4848
4849 When debugging a multi-threaded application on GNU/Linux, GDB now uses
4850 `/proc', in preference to `ptrace' for memory reads. This may result
4851 in an improvement in the start-up time of multi-threaded, shared
4852 library applications when run under GDB. One GDB user writes: ``loads
4853 shared libs like mad''.
4854
4855 * ``gdbserver'' now supports multi-threaded applications on some targets
4856
4857 Support for debugging multi-threaded applications which use
4858 the GNU/Linux LinuxThreads package has been added for
4859 arm*-*-linux*-gnu*, i[3456]86-*-linux*-gnu*, mips*-*-linux*-gnu*,
4860 powerpc*-*-linux*-gnu*, and sh*-*-linux*-gnu*.
4861
4862 * GDB now supports C/C++ preprocessor macros.
4863
4864 GDB now expands preprocessor macro invocations in C/C++ expressions,
4865 and provides various commands for showing macro definitions and how
4866 they expand.
4867
4868 The new command `macro expand EXPRESSION' expands any macro
4869 invocations in expression, and shows the result.
4870
4871 The new command `show macro MACRO-NAME' shows the definition of the
4872 macro named MACRO-NAME, and where it was defined.
4873
4874 Most compilers don't include information about macros in the debugging
4875 information by default. In GCC 3.1, for example, you need to compile
4876 your program with the options `-gdwarf-2 -g3'. If the macro
4877 information is present in the executable, GDB will read it.
4878
4879 * Multi-arched targets.
4880
4881 DEC Alpha (partial) alpha*-*-*
4882 DEC VAX (partial) vax-*-*
4883 NEC V850 v850-*-*
4884 National Semiconductor NS32000 (partial) ns32k-*-*
4885 Motorola 68000 (partial) m68k-*-*
4886 Motorola MCORE mcore-*-*
4887
4888 * New targets.
4889
4890 Fujitsu FRV architecture added by Red Hat frv*-*-*
4891
4892
4893 * New native configurations
4894
4895 Alpha NetBSD alpha*-*-netbsd*
4896 SH NetBSD sh*-*-netbsdelf*
4897 MIPS NetBSD mips*-*-netbsd*
4898 UltraSPARC NetBSD sparc64-*-netbsd*
4899
4900 * OBSOLETE configurations and files
4901
4902 Configurations that have been declared obsolete in this release have
4903 been commented out. Unless there is activity to revive these
4904 configurations, the next release of GDB will have their sources
4905 permanently REMOVED.
4906
4907 Mitsubishi D30V d30v-*-*
4908 OS/9000 i[34]86-*-os9k
4909 IBM AIX PS/2 i[3456]86-*-aix
4910 Fujitsu FR30 fr30-*-elf*
4911 Motorola Delta 88000 running Sys V m88k-motorola-sysv or delta88
4912 Argonaut Risc Chip (ARC) arc-*-*
4913 i386 running Mach 3.0 i[3456]86-*-mach3*
4914 i386 running Mach i[3456]86-*-mach*
4915 i386 running OSF/1 i[3456]86-*osf1mk*
4916 HP/Apollo 68k Family m68*-apollo*-sysv*,
4917 m68*-apollo*-bsd*,
4918 m68*-hp-bsd*, m68*-hp-hpux*
4919 I960 with MON960 i960-*-coff
4920
4921 * OBSOLETE languages
4922
4923 CHILL, a Pascal like language used by telecommunications companies.
4924
4925 * REMOVED configurations and files
4926
4927 AMD 29k family via UDI a29k-amd-udi, udi29k
4928 A29K VxWorks a29k-*-vxworks
4929 AMD 29000 embedded, using EBMON a29k-none-none
4930 AMD 29000 embedded with COFF a29k-none-coff
4931 AMD 29000 embedded with a.out a29k-none-aout
4932
4933 testsuite/gdb.hp/gdb.threads-hp/ directory
4934
4935 * New command "set max-user-call-depth <nnn>"
4936
4937 This command allows the user to limit the call depth of user-defined
4938 commands. The default is 1024.
4939
4940 * Changes in FreeBSD/i386 native debugging.
4941
4942 Support for the "generate-core-file" has been added.
4943
4944 * New commands "dump", "append", and "restore".
4945
4946 These commands allow data to be copied from target memory
4947 to a bfd-format or binary file (dump and append), and back
4948 from a file into memory (restore).
4949
4950 * Improved "next/step" support on multi-processor Alpha Tru64.
4951
4952 The previous single-step mechanism could cause unpredictable problems,
4953 including the random appearance of SIGSEGV or SIGTRAP signals. The use
4954 of a software single-step mechanism prevents this.
4955
4956 *** Changes in GDB 5.2.1:
4957
4958 * New targets.
4959
4960 Atmel AVR avr*-*-*
4961
4962 * Bug fixes
4963
4964 gdb/182: gdb/323: gdb/237: On alpha, gdb was reporting:
4965 mdebugread.c:2443: gdb-internal-error: sect_index_data not initialized
4966 Fix, by Joel Brobecker imported from mainline.
4967
4968 gdb/439: gdb/291: On some ELF object files, gdb was reporting:
4969 dwarf2read.c:1072: gdb-internal-error: sect_index_text not initialize
4970 Fix, by Fred Fish, imported from mainline.
4971
4972 Dwarf2 .debug_frame & .eh_frame handler improved in many ways.
4973 Surprisingly enough, it works now.
4974 By Michal Ludvig, imported from mainline.
4975
4976 i386 hardware watchpoint support:
4977 avoid misses on second run for some targets.
4978 By Pierre Muller, imported from mainline.
4979
4980 *** Changes in GDB 5.2:
4981
4982 * New command "set trust-readonly-sections on[off]".
4983
4984 This command is a hint that tells gdb that read-only sections
4985 really are read-only (ie. that their contents will not change).
4986 In this mode, gdb will go to the object file rather than the
4987 target to read memory from read-only sections (such as ".text").
4988 This can be a significant performance improvement on some
4989 (notably embedded) targets.
4990
4991 * New command "generate-core-file" (or "gcore").
4992
4993 This new gdb command allows the user to drop a core file of the child
4994 process state at any time. So far it's been implemented only for
4995 GNU/Linux and Solaris, but should be relatively easily ported to other
4996 hosts. Argument is core file name (defaults to core.<pid>).
4997
4998 * New command line option
4999
5000 GDB now accepts --pid or -p followed by a process id.
5001
5002 * Change in command line behavior -- corefiles vs. process ids.
5003
5004 There is a subtle behavior in the way in which GDB handles
5005 command line arguments. The first non-flag argument is always
5006 a program to debug, but the second non-flag argument may either
5007 be a corefile or a process id. Previously, GDB would attempt to
5008 open the second argument as a corefile, and if that failed, would
5009 issue a superfluous error message and then attempt to attach it as
5010 a process. Now, if the second argument begins with a non-digit,
5011 it will be treated as a corefile. If it begins with a digit,
5012 GDB will attempt to attach it as a process, and if no such process
5013 is found, will then attempt to open it as a corefile.
5014
5015 * Changes in ARM configurations.
5016
5017 Multi-arch support is enabled for all ARM configurations. The ARM/NetBSD
5018 configuration is fully multi-arch.
5019
5020 * New native configurations
5021
5022 ARM NetBSD arm*-*-netbsd*
5023 x86 OpenBSD i[3456]86-*-openbsd*
5024 AMD x86-64 running GNU/Linux x86_64-*-linux-*
5025 Sparc64 running FreeBSD sparc64-*-freebsd*
5026
5027 * New targets
5028
5029 Sanyo XStormy16 xstormy16-elf
5030
5031 * OBSOLETE configurations and files
5032
5033 Configurations that have been declared obsolete in this release have
5034 been commented out. Unless there is activity to revive these
5035 configurations, the next release of GDB will have their sources
5036 permanently REMOVED.
5037
5038 AMD 29k family via UDI a29k-amd-udi, udi29k
5039 A29K VxWorks a29k-*-vxworks
5040 AMD 29000 embedded, using EBMON a29k-none-none
5041 AMD 29000 embedded with COFF a29k-none-coff
5042 AMD 29000 embedded with a.out a29k-none-aout
5043
5044 testsuite/gdb.hp/gdb.threads-hp/ directory
5045
5046 * REMOVED configurations and files
5047
5048 TI TMS320C80 tic80-*-*
5049 WDC 65816 w65-*-*
5050 PowerPC Solaris powerpcle-*-solaris*
5051 PowerPC Windows NT powerpcle-*-cygwin32
5052 PowerPC Netware powerpc-*-netware*
5053 Harris/CXUX m88k m88*-harris-cxux*
5054 Most ns32k hosts and targets ns32k-*-mach3* ns32k-umax-*
5055 ns32k-utek-sysv* ns32k-utek-*
5056 SunOS 4.0.Xi on i386 i[3456]86-*-sunos*
5057 Ultracomputer (29K) running Sym1 a29k-nyu-sym1 a29k-*-kern*
5058 Sony NEWS (68K) running NEWSOS 3.x m68*-sony-sysv news
5059 ISI Optimum V (3.05) under 4.3bsd. m68*-isi-*
5060 Apple Macintosh (MPW) host and target N/A host, powerpc-*-macos*
5061
5062 * Changes to command line processing
5063
5064 The new `--args' feature can be used to specify command-line arguments
5065 for the inferior from gdb's command line.
5066
5067 * Changes to key bindings
5068
5069 There is a new `operate-and-get-next' function bound to `C-o'.
5070
5071 *** Changes in GDB 5.1.1
5072
5073 Fix compile problem on DJGPP.
5074
5075 Fix a problem with floating-point registers on the i386 being
5076 corrupted.
5077
5078 Fix to stop GDB crashing on .debug_str debug info.
5079
5080 Numerous documentation fixes.
5081
5082 Numerous testsuite fixes.
5083
5084 *** Changes in GDB 5.1:
5085
5086 * New native configurations
5087
5088 Alpha FreeBSD alpha*-*-freebsd*
5089 x86 FreeBSD 3.x and 4.x i[3456]86*-freebsd[34]*
5090 MIPS GNU/Linux mips*-*-linux*
5091 MIPS SGI Irix 6.x mips*-sgi-irix6*
5092 ia64 AIX ia64-*-aix*
5093 s390 and s390x GNU/Linux {s390,s390x}-*-linux*
5094
5095 * New targets
5096
5097 Motorola 68HC11 and 68HC12 m68hc11-elf
5098 CRIS cris-axis
5099 UltraSparc running GNU/Linux sparc64-*-linux*
5100
5101 * OBSOLETE configurations and files
5102
5103 x86 FreeBSD before 2.2 i[3456]86*-freebsd{1,2.[01]}*,
5104 Harris/CXUX m88k m88*-harris-cxux*
5105 Most ns32k hosts and targets ns32k-*-mach3* ns32k-umax-*
5106 ns32k-utek-sysv* ns32k-utek-*
5107 TI TMS320C80 tic80-*-*
5108 WDC 65816 w65-*-*
5109 Ultracomputer (29K) running Sym1 a29k-nyu-sym1 a29k-*-kern*
5110 PowerPC Solaris powerpcle-*-solaris*
5111 PowerPC Windows NT powerpcle-*-cygwin32
5112 PowerPC Netware powerpc-*-netware*
5113 SunOS 4.0.Xi on i386 i[3456]86-*-sunos*
5114 Sony NEWS (68K) running NEWSOS 3.x m68*-sony-sysv news
5115 ISI Optimum V (3.05) under 4.3bsd. m68*-isi-*
5116 Apple Macintosh (MPW) host N/A
5117
5118 stuff.c (Program to stuff files into a specially prepared space in kdb)
5119 kdb-start.c (Main loop for the standalone kernel debugger)
5120
5121 Configurations that have been declared obsolete in this release have
5122 been commented out. Unless there is activity to revive these
5123 configurations, the next release of GDB will have their sources
5124 permanently REMOVED.
5125
5126 * REMOVED configurations and files
5127
5128 Altos 3068 m68*-altos-*
5129 Convex c1-*-*, c2-*-*
5130 Pyramid pyramid-*-*
5131 ARM RISCix arm-*-* (as host)
5132 Tahoe tahoe-*-*
5133 ser-ocd.c *-*-*
5134
5135 * GDB has been converted to ISO C.
5136
5137 GDB's source code has been converted to ISO C. In particular, the
5138 sources are fully protoized, and rely on standard headers being
5139 present.
5140
5141 * Other news:
5142
5143 * "info symbol" works on platforms which use COFF, ECOFF, XCOFF, and NLM.
5144
5145 * The MI enabled by default.
5146
5147 The new machine oriented interface (MI) introduced in GDB 5.0 has been
5148 revised and enabled by default. Packages which use GDB as a debugging
5149 engine behind a UI or another front end are encouraged to switch to
5150 using the GDB/MI interface, instead of the old annotations interface
5151 which is now deprecated.
5152
5153 * Support for debugging Pascal programs.
5154
5155 GDB now includes support for debugging Pascal programs. The following
5156 main features are supported:
5157
5158 - Pascal-specific data types such as sets;
5159
5160 - automatic recognition of Pascal sources based on file-name
5161 extension;
5162
5163 - Pascal-style display of data types, variables, and functions;
5164
5165 - a Pascal expression parser.
5166
5167 However, some important features are not yet supported.
5168
5169 - Pascal string operations are not supported at all;
5170
5171 - there are some problems with boolean types;
5172
5173 - Pascal type hexadecimal constants are not supported
5174 because they conflict with the internal variables format;
5175
5176 - support for Pascal objects and classes is not full yet;
5177
5178 - unlike Pascal, GDB is case-sensitive for symbol names.
5179
5180 * Changes in completion.
5181
5182 Commands such as `shell', `run' and `set args', which pass arguments
5183 to inferior programs, now complete on file names, similar to what
5184 users expect at the shell prompt.
5185
5186 Commands which accept locations, such as `disassemble', `print',
5187 `breakpoint', `until', etc. now complete on filenames as well as
5188 program symbols. Thus, if you type "break foob TAB", and the source
5189 files linked into the programs include `foobar.c', that file name will
5190 be one of the candidates for completion. However, file names are not
5191 considered for completion after you typed a colon that delimits a file
5192 name from a name of a function in that file, as in "break foo.c:bar".
5193
5194 `set demangle-style' completes on available demangling styles.
5195
5196 * New platform-independent commands:
5197
5198 It is now possible to define a post-hook for a command as well as a
5199 hook that runs before the command. For more details, see the
5200 documentation of `hookpost' in the GDB manual.
5201
5202 * Changes in GNU/Linux native debugging.
5203
5204 Support for debugging multi-threaded programs has been completely
5205 revised for all platforms except m68k and sparc. You can now debug as
5206 many threads as your system allows you to have.
5207
5208 Attach/detach is supported for multi-threaded programs.
5209
5210 Support for SSE registers was added for x86. This doesn't work for
5211 multi-threaded programs though.
5212
5213 * Changes in MIPS configurations.
5214
5215 Multi-arch support is enabled for all MIPS configurations.
5216
5217 GDB can now be built as native debugger on SGI Irix 6.x systems for
5218 debugging n32 executables. (Debugging 64-bit executables is not yet
5219 supported.)
5220
5221 * Unified support for hardware watchpoints in all x86 configurations.
5222
5223 Most (if not all) native x86 configurations support hardware-assisted
5224 breakpoints and watchpoints in a unified manner. This support
5225 implements debug register sharing between watchpoints, which allows to
5226 put a virtually infinite number of watchpoints on the same address,
5227 and also supports watching regions up to 16 bytes with several debug
5228 registers.
5229
5230 The new maintenance command `maintenance show-debug-regs' toggles
5231 debugging print-outs in functions that insert, remove, and test
5232 watchpoints and hardware breakpoints.
5233
5234 * Changes in the DJGPP native configuration.
5235
5236 New command ``info dos sysinfo'' displays assorted information about
5237 the CPU, OS, memory, and DPMI server.
5238
5239 New commands ``info dos gdt'', ``info dos ldt'', and ``info dos idt''
5240 display information about segment descriptors stored in GDT, LDT, and
5241 IDT.
5242
5243 New commands ``info dos pde'' and ``info dos pte'' display entries
5244 from Page Directory and Page Tables (for now works with CWSDPMI only).
5245 New command ``info dos address-pte'' displays the Page Table entry for
5246 a given linear address.
5247
5248 GDB can now pass command lines longer than 126 characters to the
5249 program being debugged (requires an update to the libdbg.a library
5250 which is part of the DJGPP development kit).
5251
5252 DWARF2 debug info is now supported.
5253
5254 It is now possible to `step' and `next' through calls to `longjmp'.
5255
5256 * Changes in documentation.
5257
5258 All GDB documentation was converted to GFDL, the GNU Free
5259 Documentation License.
5260
5261 Tracepoints-related commands are now fully documented in the GDB
5262 manual.
5263
5264 TUI, the Text-mode User Interface, is now documented in the manual.
5265
5266 Tracepoints-related commands are now fully documented in the GDB
5267 manual.
5268
5269 The "GDB Internals" manual now has an index. It also includes
5270 documentation of `ui_out' functions, GDB coding standards, x86
5271 hardware watchpoints, and memory region attributes.
5272
5273 * GDB's version number moved to ``version.in''
5274
5275 The Makefile variable VERSION has been replaced by the file
5276 ``version.in''. People creating GDB distributions should update the
5277 contents of this file.
5278
5279 * gdba.el deleted
5280
5281 GUD support is now a standard part of the EMACS distribution.
5282
5283 *** Changes in GDB 5.0:
5284
5285 * Improved support for debugging FP programs on x86 targets
5286
5287 Unified and much-improved support for debugging floating-point
5288 programs on all x86 targets. In particular, ``info float'' now
5289 displays the FP registers in the same format on all x86 targets, with
5290 greater level of detail.
5291
5292 * Improvements and bugfixes in hardware-assisted watchpoints
5293
5294 It is now possible to watch array elements, struct members, and
5295 bitfields with hardware-assisted watchpoints. Data-read watchpoints
5296 on x86 targets no longer erroneously trigger when the address is
5297 written.
5298
5299 * Improvements in the native DJGPP version of GDB
5300
5301 The distribution now includes all the scripts and auxiliary files
5302 necessary to build the native DJGPP version on MS-DOS/MS-Windows
5303 machines ``out of the box''.
5304
5305 The DJGPP version can now debug programs that use signals. It is
5306 possible to catch signals that happened in the debuggee, deliver
5307 signals to it, interrupt it with Ctrl-C, etc. (Previously, a signal
5308 would kill the program being debugged.) Programs that hook hardware
5309 interrupts (keyboard, timer, etc.) can also be debugged.
5310
5311 It is now possible to debug DJGPP programs that redirect their
5312 standard handles or switch them to raw (as opposed to cooked) mode, or
5313 even close them. The command ``run < foo > bar'' works as expected,
5314 and ``info terminal'' reports useful information about the debuggee's
5315 terminal, including raw/cooked mode, redirection, etc.
5316
5317 The DJGPP version now uses termios functions for console I/O, which
5318 enables debugging graphics programs. Interrupting GDB with Ctrl-C
5319 also works.
5320
5321 DOS-style file names with drive letters are now fully supported by
5322 GDB.
5323
5324 It is now possible to debug DJGPP programs that switch their working
5325 directory. It is also possible to rerun the debuggee any number of
5326 times without restarting GDB; thus, you can use the same setup,
5327 breakpoints, etc. for many debugging sessions.
5328
5329 * New native configurations
5330
5331 ARM GNU/Linux arm*-*-linux*
5332 PowerPC GNU/Linux powerpc-*-linux*
5333
5334 * New targets
5335
5336 Motorola MCore mcore-*-*
5337 x86 VxWorks i[3456]86-*-vxworks*
5338 PowerPC VxWorks powerpc-*-vxworks*
5339 TI TMS320C80 tic80-*-*
5340
5341 * OBSOLETE configurations
5342
5343 Altos 3068 m68*-altos-*
5344 Convex c1-*-*, c2-*-*
5345 Pyramid pyramid-*-*
5346 ARM RISCix arm-*-* (as host)
5347 Tahoe tahoe-*-*
5348
5349 Configurations that have been declared obsolete will be commented out,
5350 but the code will be left in place. If there is no activity to revive
5351 these configurations before the next release of GDB, the sources will
5352 be permanently REMOVED.
5353
5354 * Gould support removed
5355
5356 Support for the Gould PowerNode and NP1 has been removed.
5357
5358 * New features for SVR4
5359
5360 On SVR4 native platforms (such as Solaris), if you attach to a process
5361 without first loading a symbol file, GDB will now attempt to locate and
5362 load symbols from the running process's executable file.
5363
5364 * Many C++ enhancements
5365
5366 C++ support has been greatly improved. Overload resolution now works properly
5367 in almost all cases. RTTI support is on the way.
5368
5369 * Remote targets can connect to a sub-program
5370
5371 A popen(3) style serial-device has been added. This device starts a
5372 sub-process (such as a stand-alone simulator) and then communicates
5373 with that. The sub-program to run is specified using the syntax
5374 ``|<program> <args>'' vis:
5375
5376 (gdb) set remotedebug 1
5377 (gdb) target extended-remote |mn10300-elf-sim program-args
5378
5379 * MIPS 64 remote protocol
5380
5381 A long standing bug in the mips64 remote protocol where by GDB
5382 expected certain 32 bit registers (ex SR) to be transfered as 32
5383 instead of 64 bits has been fixed.
5384
5385 The command ``set remote-mips64-transfers-32bit-regs on'' has been
5386 added to provide backward compatibility with older versions of GDB.
5387
5388 * ``set remotebinarydownload'' replaced by ``set remote X-packet''
5389
5390 The command ``set remotebinarydownload'' command has been replaced by
5391 ``set remote X-packet''. Other commands in ``set remote'' family
5392 include ``set remote P-packet''.
5393
5394 * Breakpoint commands accept ranges.
5395
5396 The breakpoint commands ``enable'', ``disable'', and ``delete'' now
5397 accept a range of breakpoints, e.g. ``5-7''. The tracepoint command
5398 ``tracepoint passcount'' also accepts a range of tracepoints.
5399
5400 * ``apropos'' command added.
5401
5402 The ``apropos'' command searches through command names and
5403 documentation strings, printing out matches, making it much easier to
5404 try to find a command that does what you are looking for.
5405
5406 * New MI interface
5407
5408 A new machine oriented interface (MI) has been added to GDB. This
5409 interface is designed for debug environments running GDB as a separate
5410 process. This is part of the long term libGDB project. See the
5411 "GDB/MI" chapter of the GDB manual for further information. It can be
5412 enabled by configuring with:
5413
5414 .../configure --enable-gdbmi
5415
5416 *** Changes in GDB-4.18:
5417
5418 * New native configurations
5419
5420 HP-UX 10.20 hppa*-*-hpux10.20
5421 HP-UX 11.x hppa*-*-hpux11.0*
5422 M68K GNU/Linux m68*-*-linux*
5423
5424 * New targets
5425
5426 Fujitsu FR30 fr30-*-elf*
5427 Intel StrongARM strongarm-*-*
5428 Mitsubishi D30V d30v-*-*
5429
5430 * OBSOLETE configurations
5431
5432 Gould PowerNode, NP1 np1-*-*, pn-*-*
5433
5434 Configurations that have been declared obsolete will be commented out,
5435 but the code will be left in place. If there is no activity to revive
5436 these configurations before the next release of GDB, the sources will
5437 be permanently REMOVED.
5438
5439 * ANSI/ISO C
5440
5441 As a compatibility experiment, GDB's source files buildsym.h and
5442 buildsym.c have been converted to pure standard C, no longer
5443 containing any K&R compatibility code. We believe that all systems in
5444 use today either come with a standard C compiler, or have a GCC port
5445 available. If this is not true, please report the affected
5446 configuration to bug-gdb@gnu.org immediately. See the README file for
5447 information about getting a standard C compiler if you don't have one
5448 already.
5449
5450 * Readline 2.2
5451
5452 GDB now uses readline 2.2.
5453
5454 * set extension-language
5455
5456 You can now control the mapping between filename extensions and source
5457 languages by using the `set extension-language' command. For instance,
5458 you can ask GDB to treat .c files as C++ by saying
5459 set extension-language .c c++
5460 The command `info extensions' lists all of the recognized extensions
5461 and their associated languages.
5462
5463 * Setting processor type for PowerPC and RS/6000
5464
5465 When GDB is configured for a powerpc*-*-* or an rs6000*-*-* target,
5466 you can use the `set processor' command to specify what variant of the
5467 PowerPC family you are debugging. The command
5468
5469 set processor NAME
5470
5471 sets the PowerPC/RS6000 variant to NAME. GDB knows about the
5472 following PowerPC and RS6000 variants:
5473
5474 ppc-uisa PowerPC UISA - a PPC processor as viewed by user-level code
5475 rs6000 IBM RS6000 ("POWER") architecture, user-level view
5476 403 IBM PowerPC 403
5477 403GC IBM PowerPC 403GC
5478 505 Motorola PowerPC 505
5479 860 Motorola PowerPC 860 or 850
5480 601 Motorola PowerPC 601
5481 602 Motorola PowerPC 602
5482 603 Motorola/IBM PowerPC 603 or 603e
5483 604 Motorola PowerPC 604 or 604e
5484 750 Motorola/IBM PowerPC 750 or 750
5485
5486 At the moment, this command just tells GDB what to name the
5487 special-purpose processor registers. Since almost all the affected
5488 registers are inaccessible to user-level programs, this command is
5489 only useful for remote debugging in its present form.
5490
5491 * HP-UX support
5492
5493 Thanks to a major code donation from Hewlett-Packard, GDB now has much
5494 more extensive support for HP-UX. Added features include shared
5495 library support, kernel threads and hardware watchpoints for 11.00,
5496 support for HP's ANSI C and C++ compilers, and a compatibility mode
5497 for xdb and dbx commands.
5498
5499 * Catchpoints
5500
5501 HP's donation includes the new concept of catchpoints, which is a
5502 generalization of the old catch command. On HP-UX, it is now possible
5503 to catch exec, fork, and vfork, as well as library loading.
5504
5505 This means that the existing catch command has changed; its first
5506 argument now specifies the type of catch to be set up. See the
5507 output of "help catch" for a list of catchpoint types.
5508
5509 * Debugging across forks
5510
5511 On HP-UX, you can choose which process to debug when a fork() happens
5512 in the inferior.
5513
5514 * TUI
5515
5516 HP has donated a curses-based terminal user interface (TUI). To get
5517 it, build with --enable-tui. Although this can be enabled for any
5518 configuration, at present it only works for native HP debugging.
5519
5520 * GDB remote protocol additions
5521
5522 A new protocol packet 'X' that writes binary data is now available.
5523 Default behavior is to try 'X', then drop back to 'M' if the stub
5524 fails to respond. The settable variable `remotebinarydownload'
5525 allows explicit control over the use of 'X'.
5526
5527 For 64-bit targets, the memory packets ('M' and 'm') can now contain a
5528 full 64-bit address. The command
5529
5530 set remoteaddresssize 32
5531
5532 can be used to revert to the old behaviour. For existing remote stubs
5533 the change should not be noticed, as the additional address information
5534 will be discarded.
5535
5536 In order to assist in debugging stubs, you may use the maintenance
5537 command `packet' to send any text string to the stub. For instance,
5538
5539 maint packet heythere
5540
5541 sends the packet "$heythere#<checksum>". Note that it is very easy to
5542 disrupt a debugging session by sending the wrong packet at the wrong
5543 time.
5544
5545 The compare-sections command allows you to compare section data on the
5546 target to what is in the executable file without uploading or
5547 downloading, by comparing CRC checksums.
5548
5549 * Tracing can collect general expressions
5550
5551 You may now collect general expressions at tracepoints. This requires
5552 further additions to the target-side stub; see tracepoint.c and
5553 doc/agentexpr.texi for further details.
5554
5555 * mask-address variable for Mips
5556
5557 For Mips targets, you may control the zeroing of the upper 32 bits of
5558 a 64-bit address by entering `set mask-address on'. This is mainly
5559 of interest to users of embedded R4xxx and R5xxx processors.
5560
5561 * Higher serial baud rates
5562
5563 GDB's serial code now allows you to specify baud rates 57600, 115200,
5564 230400, and 460800 baud. (Note that your host system may not be able
5565 to achieve all of these rates.)
5566
5567 * i960 simulator
5568
5569 The i960 configuration now includes an initial implementation of a
5570 builtin simulator, contributed by Jim Wilson.
5571
5572
5573 *** Changes in GDB-4.17:
5574
5575 * New native configurations
5576
5577 Alpha GNU/Linux alpha*-*-linux*
5578 Unixware 2.x i[3456]86-unixware2*
5579 Irix 6.x mips*-sgi-irix6*
5580 PowerPC GNU/Linux powerpc-*-linux*
5581 PowerPC Solaris powerpcle-*-solaris*
5582 Sparc GNU/Linux sparc-*-linux*
5583 Motorola sysV68 R3V7.1 m68k-motorola-sysv
5584
5585 * New targets
5586
5587 Argonaut Risc Chip (ARC) arc-*-*
5588 Hitachi H8/300S h8300*-*-*
5589 Matsushita MN10200 w/simulator mn10200-*-*
5590 Matsushita MN10300 w/simulator mn10300-*-*
5591 MIPS NEC VR4100 mips64*vr4100*{,el}-*-elf*
5592 MIPS NEC VR5000 mips64*vr5000*{,el}-*-elf*
5593 MIPS Toshiba TX39 mips64*tx39*{,el}-*-elf*
5594 Mitsubishi D10V w/simulator d10v-*-*
5595 Mitsubishi M32R/D w/simulator m32r-*-elf*
5596 Tsqware Sparclet sparclet-*-*
5597 NEC V850 w/simulator v850-*-*
5598
5599 * New debugging protocols
5600
5601 ARM with RDI protocol arm*-*-*
5602 M68K with dBUG monitor m68*-*-{aout,coff,elf}
5603 DDB and LSI variants of PMON protocol mips*-*-*
5604 PowerPC with DINK32 monitor powerpc{,le}-*-eabi
5605 PowerPC with SDS protocol powerpc{,le}-*-eabi
5606 Macraigor OCD (Wiggler) devices powerpc{,le}-*-eabi
5607
5608 * DWARF 2
5609
5610 All configurations can now understand and use the DWARF 2 debugging
5611 format. The choice is automatic, if the symbol file contains DWARF 2
5612 information.
5613
5614 * Java frontend
5615
5616 GDB now includes basic Java language support. This support is
5617 only useful with Java compilers that produce native machine code.
5618
5619 * solib-absolute-prefix and solib-search-path
5620
5621 For SunOS and SVR4 shared libraries, you may now set the prefix for
5622 loading absolute shared library symbol files, and the search path for
5623 locating non-absolute shared library symbol files.
5624
5625 * Live range splitting
5626
5627 GDB can now effectively debug code for which GCC has performed live
5628 range splitting as part of its optimization. See gdb/doc/LRS for
5629 more details on the expected format of the stabs information.
5630
5631 * Hurd support
5632
5633 GDB's support for the GNU Hurd, including thread debugging, has been
5634 updated to work with current versions of the Hurd.
5635
5636 * ARM Thumb support
5637
5638 GDB's ARM target configuration now handles the ARM7T (Thumb) 16-bit
5639 instruction set. ARM GDB automatically detects when Thumb
5640 instructions are in use, and adjusts disassembly and backtracing
5641 accordingly.
5642
5643 * MIPS16 support
5644
5645 GDB's MIPS target configurations now handle the MIP16 16-bit
5646 instruction set.
5647
5648 * Overlay support
5649
5650 GDB now includes support for overlays; if an executable has been
5651 linked such that multiple sections are based at the same address, GDB
5652 will decide which section to use for symbolic info. You can choose to
5653 control the decision manually, using overlay commands, or implement
5654 additional target-side support and use "overlay load-target" to bring
5655 in the overlay mapping. Do "help overlay" for more detail.
5656
5657 * info symbol
5658
5659 The command "info symbol <address>" displays information about
5660 the symbol at the specified address.
5661
5662 * Trace support
5663
5664 The standard remote protocol now includes an extension that allows
5665 asynchronous collection and display of trace data. This requires
5666 extensive support in the target-side debugging stub. Tracing mode
5667 includes a new interaction mode in GDB and new commands: see the
5668 file tracepoint.c for more details.
5669
5670 * MIPS simulator
5671
5672 Configurations for embedded MIPS now include a simulator contributed
5673 by Cygnus Solutions. The simulator supports the instruction sets
5674 of most MIPS variants.
5675
5676 * Sparc simulator
5677
5678 Sparc configurations may now include the ERC32 simulator contributed
5679 by the European Space Agency. The simulator is not built into
5680 Sparc targets by default; configure with --enable-sim to include it.
5681
5682 * set architecture
5683
5684 For target configurations that may include multiple variants of a
5685 basic architecture (such as MIPS and SH), you may now set the
5686 architecture explicitly. "set arch" sets, "info arch" lists
5687 the possible architectures.
5688
5689 *** Changes in GDB-4.16:
5690
5691 * New native configurations
5692
5693 Windows 95, x86 Windows NT i[345]86-*-cygwin32
5694 M68K NetBSD m68k-*-netbsd*
5695 PowerPC AIX 4.x powerpc-*-aix*
5696 PowerPC MacOS powerpc-*-macos*
5697 PowerPC Windows NT powerpcle-*-cygwin32
5698 RS/6000 AIX 4.x rs6000-*-aix4*
5699
5700 * New targets
5701
5702 ARM with RDP protocol arm-*-*
5703 I960 with MON960 i960-*-coff
5704 MIPS VxWorks mips*-*-vxworks*
5705 MIPS VR4300 with PMON mips64*vr4300{,el}-*-elf*
5706 PowerPC with PPCBUG monitor powerpc{,le}-*-eabi*
5707 Hitachi SH3 sh-*-*
5708 Matra Sparclet sparclet-*-*
5709
5710 * PowerPC simulator
5711
5712 The powerpc-eabi configuration now includes the PSIM simulator,
5713 contributed by Andrew Cagney, with assistance from Mike Meissner.
5714 PSIM is a very elaborate model of the PowerPC, including not only
5715 basic instruction set execution, but also details of execution unit
5716 performance and I/O hardware. See sim/ppc/README for more details.
5717
5718 * Solaris 2.5
5719
5720 GDB now works with Solaris 2.5.
5721
5722 * Windows 95/NT native
5723
5724 GDB will now work as a native debugger on Windows 95 and Windows NT.
5725 To build it from source, you must use the "gnu-win32" environment,
5726 which uses a DLL to emulate enough of Unix to run the GNU tools.
5727 Further information, binaries, and sources are available at
5728 ftp.cygnus.com, under pub/gnu-win32.
5729
5730 * dont-repeat command
5731
5732 If a user-defined command includes the command `dont-repeat', then the
5733 command will not be repeated if the user just types return. This is
5734 useful if the command is time-consuming to run, so that accidental
5735 extra keystrokes don't run the same command many times.
5736
5737 * Send break instead of ^C
5738
5739 The standard remote protocol now includes an option to send a break
5740 rather than a ^C to the target in order to interrupt it. By default,
5741 GDB will send ^C; to send a break, set the variable `remotebreak' to 1.
5742
5743 * Remote protocol timeout
5744
5745 The standard remote protocol includes a new variable `remotetimeout'
5746 that allows you to set the number of seconds before GDB gives up trying
5747 to read from the target. The default value is 2.
5748
5749 * Automatic tracking of dynamic object loading (HPUX and Solaris only)
5750
5751 By default GDB will automatically keep track of objects as they are
5752 loaded and unloaded by the dynamic linker. By using the command `set
5753 stop-on-solib-events 1' you can arrange for GDB to stop the inferior
5754 when shared library events occur, thus allowing you to set breakpoints
5755 in shared libraries which are explicitly loaded by the inferior.
5756
5757 Note this feature does not work on hpux8. On hpux9 you must link
5758 /usr/lib/end.o into your program. This feature should work
5759 automatically on hpux10.
5760
5761 * Irix 5.x hardware watchpoint support
5762
5763 Irix 5 configurations now support the use of hardware watchpoints.
5764
5765 * Mips protocol "SYN garbage limit"
5766
5767 When debugging a Mips target using the `target mips' protocol, you
5768 may set the number of characters that GDB will ignore by setting
5769 the `syn-garbage-limit'. A value of -1 means that GDB will ignore
5770 every character. The default value is 1050.
5771
5772 * Recording and replaying remote debug sessions
5773
5774 If you set `remotelogfile' to the name of a file, gdb will write to it
5775 a recording of a remote debug session. This recording may then be
5776 replayed back to gdb using "gdbreplay". See gdbserver/README for
5777 details. This is useful when you have a problem with GDB while doing
5778 remote debugging; you can make a recording of the session and send it
5779 to someone else, who can then recreate the problem.
5780
5781 * Speedups for remote debugging
5782
5783 GDB includes speedups for downloading and stepping MIPS systems using
5784 the IDT monitor, fast downloads to the Hitachi SH E7000 emulator,
5785 and more efficient S-record downloading.
5786
5787 * Memory use reductions and statistics collection
5788
5789 GDB now uses less memory and reports statistics about memory usage.
5790 Try the `maint print statistics' command, for example.
5791
5792 *** Changes in GDB-4.15:
5793
5794 * Psymtabs for XCOFF
5795
5796 The symbol reader for AIX GDB now uses partial symbol tables. This
5797 can greatly improve startup time, especially for large executables.
5798
5799 * Remote targets use caching
5800
5801 Remote targets now use a data cache to speed up communication with the
5802 remote side. The data cache could lead to incorrect results because
5803 it doesn't know about volatile variables, thus making it impossible to
5804 debug targets which use memory mapped I/O devices. `set remotecache
5805 off' turns the the data cache off.
5806
5807 * Remote targets may have threads
5808
5809 The standard remote protocol now includes support for multiple threads
5810 in the target system, using new protocol commands 'H' and 'T'. See
5811 gdb/remote.c for details.
5812
5813 * NetROM support
5814
5815 If GDB is configured with `--enable-netrom', then it will include
5816 support for the NetROM ROM emulator from XLNT Designs. The NetROM
5817 acts as though it is a bank of ROM on the target board, but you can
5818 write into it over the network. GDB's support consists only of
5819 support for fast loading into the emulated ROM; to debug, you must use
5820 another protocol, such as standard remote protocol. The usual
5821 sequence is something like
5822
5823 target nrom <netrom-hostname>
5824 load <prog>
5825 target remote <netrom-hostname>:1235
5826
5827 * Macintosh host
5828
5829 GDB now includes support for the Apple Macintosh, as a host only. It
5830 may be run as either an MPW tool or as a standalone application, and
5831 it can debug through the serial port. All the usual GDB commands are
5832 available, but to the target command, you must supply "serial" as the
5833 device type instead of "/dev/ttyXX". See mpw-README in the main
5834 directory for more information on how to build. The MPW configuration
5835 scripts */mpw-config.in support only a few targets, and only the
5836 mips-idt-ecoff target has been tested.
5837
5838 * Autoconf
5839
5840 GDB configuration now uses autoconf. This is not user-visible,
5841 but does simplify configuration and building.
5842
5843 * hpux10
5844
5845 GDB now supports hpux10.
5846
5847 *** Changes in GDB-4.14:
5848
5849 * New native configurations
5850
5851 x86 FreeBSD i[345]86-*-freebsd
5852 x86 NetBSD i[345]86-*-netbsd
5853 NS32k NetBSD ns32k-*-netbsd
5854 Sparc NetBSD sparc-*-netbsd
5855
5856 * New targets
5857
5858 A29K VxWorks a29k-*-vxworks
5859 HP PA PRO embedded (WinBond W89K & Oki OP50N) hppa*-*-pro*
5860 CPU32 EST-300 emulator m68*-*-est*
5861 PowerPC ELF powerpc-*-elf
5862 WDC 65816 w65-*-*
5863
5864 * Alpha OSF/1 support for procfs
5865
5866 GDB now supports procfs under OSF/1-2.x and higher, which makes it
5867 possible to attach to running processes. As the mounting of the /proc
5868 filesystem is optional on the Alpha, GDB automatically determines
5869 the availability of /proc during startup. This can lead to problems
5870 if /proc is unmounted after GDB has been started.
5871
5872 * Arguments to user-defined commands
5873
5874 User commands may accept up to 10 arguments separated by whitespace.
5875 Arguments are accessed within the user command via $arg0..$arg9. A
5876 trivial example:
5877 define adder
5878 print $arg0 + $arg1 + $arg2
5879
5880 To execute the command use:
5881 adder 1 2 3
5882
5883 Defines the command "adder" which prints the sum of its three arguments.
5884 Note the arguments are text substitutions, so they may reference variables,
5885 use complex expressions, or even perform inferior function calls.
5886
5887 * New `if' and `while' commands
5888
5889 This makes it possible to write more sophisticated user-defined
5890 commands. Both commands take a single argument, which is the
5891 expression to evaluate, and must be followed by the commands to
5892 execute, one per line, if the expression is nonzero, the list being
5893 terminated by the word `end'. The `if' command list may include an
5894 `else' word, which causes the following commands to be executed only
5895 if the expression is zero.
5896
5897 * Fortran source language mode
5898
5899 GDB now includes partial support for Fortran 77. It will recognize
5900 Fortran programs and can evaluate a subset of Fortran expressions, but
5901 variables and functions may not be handled correctly. GDB will work
5902 with G77, but does not yet know much about symbols emitted by other
5903 Fortran compilers.
5904
5905 * Better HPUX support
5906
5907 Most debugging facilities now work on dynamic executables for HPPAs
5908 running hpux9 or later. You can attach to running dynamically linked
5909 processes, but by default the dynamic libraries will be read-only, so
5910 for instance you won't be able to put breakpoints in them. To change
5911 that behavior do the following before running the program:
5912
5913 adb -w a.out
5914 __dld_flags?W 0x5
5915 control-d
5916
5917 This will cause the libraries to be mapped private and read-write.
5918 To revert to the normal behavior, do this:
5919
5920 adb -w a.out
5921 __dld_flags?W 0x4
5922 control-d
5923
5924 You cannot set breakpoints or examine data in the library until after
5925 the library is loaded if the function/data symbols do not have
5926 external linkage.
5927
5928 GDB can now also read debug symbols produced by the HP C compiler on
5929 HPPAs (sorry, no C++, Fortran or 68k support).
5930
5931 * Target byte order now dynamically selectable
5932
5933 You can choose which byte order to use with a target system, via the
5934 commands "set endian big" and "set endian little", and you can see the
5935 current setting by using "show endian". You can also give the command
5936 "set endian auto", in which case GDB will use the byte order
5937 associated with the executable. Currently, only embedded MIPS
5938 configurations support dynamic selection of target byte order.
5939
5940 * New DOS host serial code
5941
5942 This version uses DPMI interrupts to handle buffered I/O, so you
5943 no longer need to run asynctsr when debugging boards connected to
5944 a PC's serial port.
5945
5946 *** Changes in GDB-4.13:
5947
5948 * New "complete" command
5949
5950 This lists all the possible completions for the rest of the line, if it
5951 were to be given as a command itself. This is intended for use by emacs.
5952
5953 * Trailing space optional in prompt
5954
5955 "set prompt" no longer adds a space for you after the prompt you set. This
5956 allows you to set a prompt which ends in a space or one that does not.
5957
5958 * Breakpoint hit counts
5959
5960 "info break" now displays a count of the number of times the breakpoint
5961 has been hit. This is especially useful in conjunction with "ignore"; you
5962 can ignore a large number of breakpoint hits, look at the breakpoint info
5963 to see how many times the breakpoint was hit, then run again, ignoring one
5964 less than that number, and this will get you quickly to the last hit of
5965 that breakpoint.
5966
5967 * Ability to stop printing at NULL character
5968
5969 "set print null-stop" will cause GDB to stop printing the characters of
5970 an array when the first NULL is encountered. This is useful when large
5971 arrays actually contain only short strings.
5972
5973 * Shared library breakpoints
5974
5975 In SunOS 4.x, SVR4, and Alpha OSF/1 configurations, you can now set
5976 breakpoints in shared libraries before the executable is run.
5977
5978 * Hardware watchpoints
5979
5980 There is a new hardware breakpoint for the watch command for sparclite
5981 targets. See gdb/sparclite/hw_breakpoint.note.
5982
5983 Hardware watchpoints are also now supported under GNU/Linux.
5984
5985 * Annotations
5986
5987 Annotations have been added. These are for use with graphical interfaces,
5988 and are still experimental. Currently only gdba.el uses these.
5989
5990 * Improved Irix 5 support
5991
5992 GDB now works properly with Irix 5.2.
5993
5994 * Improved HPPA support
5995
5996 GDB now works properly with the latest GCC and GAS.
5997
5998 * New native configurations
5999
6000 Sequent PTX4 i[34]86-sequent-ptx4
6001 HPPA running OSF/1 hppa*-*-osf*
6002 Atari TT running SVR4 m68*-*-sysv4*
6003 RS/6000 LynxOS rs6000-*-lynxos*
6004
6005 * New targets
6006
6007 OS/9000 i[34]86-*-os9k
6008 MIPS R4000 mips64*{,el}-*-{ecoff,elf}
6009 Sparc64 sparc64-*-*
6010
6011 * Hitachi SH7000 and E7000-PC ICE support
6012
6013 There is now support for communicating with the Hitachi E7000-PC ICE.
6014 This is available automatically when GDB is configured for the SH.
6015
6016 * Fixes
6017
6018 As usual, a variety of small fixes and improvements, both generic
6019 and configuration-specific. See the ChangeLog for more detail.
6020
6021 *** Changes in GDB-4.12:
6022
6023 * Irix 5 is now supported
6024
6025 * HPPA support
6026
6027 GDB-4.12 on the HPPA has a number of changes which make it unable
6028 to debug the output from the currently released versions of GCC and
6029 GAS (GCC 2.5.8 and GAS-2.2 or PAGAS-1.36). Until the next major release
6030 of GCC and GAS, versions of these tools designed to work with GDB-4.12
6031 can be retrieved via anonymous ftp from jaguar.cs.utah.edu:/dist.
6032
6033
6034 *** Changes in GDB-4.11:
6035
6036 * User visible changes:
6037
6038 * Remote Debugging
6039
6040 The "set remotedebug" option is now consistent between the mips remote
6041 target, remote targets using the gdb-specific protocol, UDI (AMD's
6042 debug protocol for the 29k) and the 88k bug monitor. It is now an
6043 integer specifying a debug level (normally 0 or 1, but 2 means more
6044 debugging info for the mips target).
6045
6046 * DEC Alpha native support
6047
6048 GDB now works on the DEC Alpha. GCC 2.4.5 does not produce usable
6049 debug info, but GDB works fairly well with the DEC compiler and should
6050 work with a future GCC release. See the README file for a few
6051 Alpha-specific notes.
6052
6053 * Preliminary thread implementation
6054
6055 GDB now has preliminary thread support for both SGI/Irix and LynxOS.
6056
6057 * LynxOS native and target support for 386
6058
6059 This release has been hosted on LynxOS 2.2, and also can be configured
6060 to remotely debug programs running under LynxOS (see gdb/gdbserver/README
6061 for details).
6062
6063 * Improvements in C++ mangling/demangling.
6064
6065 This release has much better g++ debugging, specifically in name
6066 mangling/demangling, virtual function calls, print virtual table,
6067 call methods, ...etc.
6068
6069 *** Changes in GDB-4.10:
6070
6071 * User visible changes:
6072
6073 Remote debugging using the GDB-specific (`target remote') protocol now
6074 supports the `load' command. This is only useful if you have some
6075 other way of getting the stub to the target system, and you can put it
6076 somewhere in memory where it won't get clobbered by the download.
6077
6078 Filename completion now works.
6079
6080 When run under emacs mode, the "info line" command now causes the
6081 arrow to point to the line specified. Also, "info line" prints
6082 addresses in symbolic form (as well as hex).
6083
6084 All vxworks based targets now support a user settable option, called
6085 vxworks-timeout. This option represents the number of seconds gdb
6086 should wait for responses to rpc's. You might want to use this if
6087 your vxworks target is, perhaps, a slow software simulator or happens
6088 to be on the far side of a thin network line.
6089
6090 * DEC alpha support
6091
6092 This release contains support for using a DEC alpha as a GDB host for
6093 cross debugging. Native alpha debugging is not supported yet.
6094
6095
6096 *** Changes in GDB-4.9:
6097
6098 * Testsuite
6099
6100 This is the first GDB release which is accompanied by a matching testsuite.
6101 The testsuite requires installation of dejagnu, which should be available
6102 via ftp from most sites that carry GNU software.
6103
6104 * C++ demangling
6105
6106 'Cfront' style demangling has had its name changed to 'ARM' style, to
6107 emphasize that it was written from the specifications in the C++ Annotated
6108 Reference Manual, not necessarily to be compatible with AT&T cfront. Despite
6109 disclaimers, it still generated too much confusion with users attempting to
6110 use gdb with AT&T cfront.
6111
6112 * Simulators
6113
6114 GDB now uses a standard remote interface to a simulator library.
6115 So far, the library contains simulators for the Zilog Z8001/2, the
6116 Hitachi H8/300, H8/500 and Super-H.
6117
6118 * New targets supported
6119
6120 H8/300 simulator h8300-hitachi-hms or h8300hms
6121 H8/500 simulator h8500-hitachi-hms or h8500hms
6122 SH simulator sh-hitachi-hms or sh
6123 Z8000 simulator z8k-zilog-none or z8ksim
6124 IDT MIPS board over serial line mips-idt-ecoff
6125
6126 Cross-debugging to GO32 targets is supported. It requires a custom
6127 version of the i386-stub.c module which is integrated with the
6128 GO32 memory extender.
6129
6130 * New remote protocols
6131
6132 MIPS remote debugging protocol.
6133
6134 * New source languages supported
6135
6136 This version includes preliminary support for Chill, a Pascal like language
6137 used by telecommunications companies. Chill support is also being integrated
6138 into the GNU compiler, but we don't know when it will be publically available.
6139
6140
6141 *** Changes in GDB-4.8:
6142
6143 * HP Precision Architecture supported
6144
6145 GDB now supports HP PA-RISC machines running HPUX. A preliminary
6146 version of this support was available as a set of patches from the
6147 University of Utah. GDB does not support debugging of programs
6148 compiled with the HP compiler, because HP will not document their file
6149 format. Instead, you must use GCC (version 2.3.2 or later) and PA-GAS
6150 (as available from jaguar.cs.utah.edu:/dist/pa-gas.u4.tar.Z).
6151
6152 Many problems in the preliminary version have been fixed.
6153
6154 * Faster and better demangling
6155
6156 We have improved template demangling and fixed numerous bugs in the GNU style
6157 demangler. It can now handle type modifiers such as `static' or `const'. Wide
6158 character types (wchar_t) are now supported. Demangling of each symbol is now
6159 only done once, and is cached when the symbol table for a file is read in.
6160 This results in a small increase in memory usage for C programs, a moderate
6161 increase in memory usage for C++ programs, and a fantastic speedup in
6162 symbol lookups.
6163
6164 `Cfront' style demangling still doesn't work with AT&T cfront. It was written
6165 from the specifications in the Annotated Reference Manual, which AT&T's
6166 compiler does not actually implement.
6167
6168 * G++ multiple inheritance compiler problem
6169
6170 In the 2.3.2 release of gcc/g++, how the compiler resolves multiple
6171 inheritance lattices was reworked to properly discover ambiguities. We
6172 recently found an example which causes this new algorithm to fail in a
6173 very subtle way, producing bad debug information for those classes.
6174 The file 'gcc.patch' (in this directory) can be applied to gcc to
6175 circumvent the problem. A future GCC release will contain a complete
6176 fix.
6177
6178 The previous G++ debug info problem (mentioned below for the gdb-4.7
6179 release) is fixed in gcc version 2.3.2.
6180
6181 * Improved configure script
6182
6183 The `configure' script will now attempt to guess your system type if
6184 you don't supply a host system type. The old scheme of supplying a
6185 host system triplet is preferable over using this. All the magic is
6186 done in the new `config.guess' script. Examine it for details.
6187
6188 We have also brought our configure script much more in line with the FSF's
6189 version. It now supports the --with-xxx options. In particular,
6190 `--with-minimal-bfd' can be used to make the GDB binary image smaller.
6191 The resulting GDB will not be able to read arbitrary object file formats --
6192 only the format ``expected'' to be used on the configured target system.
6193 We hope to make this the default in a future release.
6194
6195 * Documentation improvements
6196
6197 There's new internal documentation on how to modify GDB, and how to
6198 produce clean changes to the code. We implore people to read it
6199 before submitting changes.
6200
6201 The GDB manual uses new, sexy Texinfo conditionals, rather than arcane
6202 M4 macros. The new texinfo.tex is provided in this release. Pre-built
6203 `info' files are also provided. To build `info' files from scratch,
6204 you will need the latest `makeinfo' release, which will be available in
6205 a future texinfo-X.Y release.
6206
6207 *NOTE* The new texinfo.tex can cause old versions of TeX to hang.
6208 We're not sure exactly which versions have this problem, but it has
6209 been seen in 3.0. We highly recommend upgrading to TeX version 3.141
6210 or better. If that isn't possible, there is a patch in
6211 `texinfo/tex3patch' that will modify `texinfo/texinfo.tex' to work
6212 around this problem.
6213
6214 * New features
6215
6216 GDB now supports array constants that can be used in expressions typed in by
6217 the user. The syntax is `{element, element, ...}'. Ie: you can now type
6218 `print {1, 2, 3}', and it will build up an array in memory malloc'd in
6219 the target program.
6220
6221 The new directory `gdb/sparclite' contains a program that demonstrates
6222 how the sparc-stub.c remote stub runs on a Fujitsu SPARClite processor.
6223
6224 * New native hosts supported
6225
6226 HP/PA-RISC under HPUX using GNU tools hppa1.1-hp-hpux
6227 386 CPUs running SCO Unix 3.2v4 i386-unknown-sco3.2v4
6228
6229 * New targets supported
6230
6231 AMD 29k family via UDI a29k-amd-udi or udi29k
6232
6233 * New file formats supported
6234
6235 BFD now supports reading HP/PA-RISC executables (SOM file format?),
6236 HPUX core files, and SCO 3.2v2 core files.
6237
6238 * Major bug fixes
6239
6240 Attaching to processes now works again; thanks for the many bug reports.
6241
6242 We have also stomped on a bunch of core dumps caused by
6243 printf_filtered("%s") problems.
6244
6245 We eliminated a copyright problem on the rpc and ptrace header files
6246 for VxWorks, which was discovered at the last minute during the 4.7
6247 release. You should now be able to build a VxWorks GDB.
6248
6249 You can now interrupt gdb while an attached process is running. This
6250 will cause the attached process to stop, and give control back to GDB.
6251
6252 We fixed problems caused by using too many file descriptors
6253 for reading symbols from object files and libraries. This was
6254 especially a problem for programs that used many (~100) shared
6255 libraries.
6256
6257 The `step' command now only enters a subroutine if there is line number
6258 information for the subroutine. Otherwise it acts like the `next'
6259 command. Previously, `step' would enter subroutines if there was
6260 any debugging information about the routine. This avoids problems
6261 when using `cc -g1' on MIPS machines.
6262
6263 * Internal improvements
6264
6265 GDB's internal interfaces have been improved to make it easier to support
6266 debugging of multiple languages in the future.
6267
6268 GDB now uses a common structure for symbol information internally.
6269 Minimal symbols (derived from linkage symbols in object files), partial
6270 symbols (from a quick scan of debug information), and full symbols
6271 contain a common subset of information, making it easier to write
6272 shared code that handles any of them.
6273
6274 * New command line options
6275
6276 We now accept --silent as an alias for --quiet.
6277
6278 * Mmalloc licensing
6279
6280 The memory-mapped-malloc library is now licensed under the GNU Library
6281 General Public License.
6282
6283 *** Changes in GDB-4.7:
6284
6285 * Host/native/target split
6286
6287 GDB has had some major internal surgery to untangle the support for
6288 hosts and remote targets. Now, when you configure GDB for a remote
6289 target, it will no longer load in all of the support for debugging
6290 local programs on the host. When fully completed and tested, this will
6291 ensure that arbitrary host/target combinations are possible.
6292
6293 The primary conceptual shift is to separate the non-portable code in
6294 GDB into three categories. Host specific code is required any time GDB
6295 is compiled on that host, regardless of the target. Target specific
6296 code relates to the peculiarities of the target, but can be compiled on
6297 any host. Native specific code is everything else: it can only be
6298 built when the host and target are the same system. Child process
6299 handling and core file support are two common `native' examples.
6300
6301 GDB's use of /proc for controlling Unix child processes is now cleaner.
6302 It has been split out into a single module under the `target_ops' vector,
6303 plus two native-dependent functions for each system that uses /proc.
6304
6305 * New hosts supported
6306
6307 HP/Apollo 68k (under the BSD domain) m68k-apollo-bsd or apollo68bsd
6308 386 CPUs running various BSD ports i386-unknown-bsd or 386bsd
6309 386 CPUs running SCO Unix i386-unknown-scosysv322 or i386sco
6310
6311 * New targets supported
6312
6313 Fujitsu SPARClite sparclite-fujitsu-none or sparclite
6314 68030 and CPU32 m68030-*-*, m68332-*-*
6315
6316 * New native hosts supported
6317
6318 386 CPUs running various BSD ports i386-unknown-bsd or 386bsd
6319 (386bsd is not well tested yet)
6320 386 CPUs running SCO Unix i386-unknown-scosysv322 or sco
6321
6322 * New file formats supported
6323
6324 BFD now supports COFF files for the Zilog Z8000 microprocessor. It
6325 supports reading of `a.out.adobe' object files, which are an a.out
6326 format extended with minimal information about multiple sections.
6327
6328 * New commands
6329
6330 `show copying' is the same as the old `info copying'.
6331 `show warranty' is the same as `info warrantee'.
6332 These were renamed for consistency. The old commands continue to work.
6333
6334 `info handle' is a new alias for `info signals'.
6335
6336 You can now define pre-command hooks, which attach arbitrary command
6337 scripts to any command. The commands in the hook will be executed
6338 prior to the user's command. You can also create a hook which will be
6339 executed whenever the program stops. See gdb.texinfo.
6340
6341 * C++ improvements
6342
6343 We now deal with Cfront style name mangling, and can even extract type
6344 info from mangled symbols. GDB can automatically figure out which
6345 symbol mangling style your C++ compiler uses.
6346
6347 Calling of methods and virtual functions has been improved as well.
6348
6349 * Major bug fixes
6350
6351 The crash that occured when debugging Sun Ansi-C compiled binaries is
6352 fixed. This was due to mishandling of the extra N_SO stabs output
6353 by the compiler.
6354
6355 We also finally got Ultrix 4.2 running in house, and fixed core file
6356 support, with help from a dozen people on the net.
6357
6358 John M. Farrell discovered that the reason that single-stepping was so
6359 slow on all of the Mips based platforms (primarily SGI and DEC) was
6360 that we were trying to demangle and lookup a symbol used for internal
6361 purposes on every instruction that was being stepped through. Changing
6362 the name of that symbol so that it couldn't be mistaken for a C++
6363 mangled symbol sped things up a great deal.
6364
6365 Rich Pixley sped up symbol lookups in general by getting much smarter
6366 about when C++ symbol mangling is necessary. This should make symbol
6367 completion (TAB on the command line) much faster. It's not as fast as
6368 we'd like, but it's significantly faster than gdb-4.6.
6369
6370 * AMD 29k support
6371
6372 A new user controllable variable 'call_scratch_address' can
6373 specify the location of a scratch area to be used when GDB
6374 calls a function in the target. This is necessary because the
6375 usual method of putting the scratch area on the stack does not work
6376 in systems that have separate instruction and data spaces.
6377
6378 We integrated changes to support the 29k UDI (Universal Debugger
6379 Interface), but discovered at the last minute that we didn't have all
6380 of the appropriate copyright paperwork. We are working with AMD to
6381 resolve this, and hope to have it available soon.
6382
6383 * Remote interfaces
6384
6385 We have sped up the remote serial line protocol, especially for targets
6386 with lots of registers. It now supports a new `expedited status' ('T')
6387 message which can be used in place of the existing 'S' status message.
6388 This allows the remote stub to send only the registers that GDB
6389 needs to make a quick decision about single-stepping or conditional
6390 breakpoints, eliminating the need to fetch the entire register set for
6391 each instruction being stepped through.
6392
6393 The GDB remote serial protocol now implements a write-through cache for
6394 registers, only re-reading the registers if the target has run.
6395
6396 There is also a new remote serial stub for SPARC processors. You can
6397 find it in gdb-4.7/gdb/sparc-stub.c. This was written to support the
6398 Fujitsu SPARClite processor, but will run on any stand-alone SPARC
6399 processor with a serial port.
6400
6401 * Configuration
6402
6403 Configure.in files have become much easier to read and modify. A new
6404 `table driven' format makes it more obvious what configurations are
6405 supported, and what files each one uses.
6406
6407 * Library changes
6408
6409 There is a new opcodes library which will eventually contain all of the
6410 disassembly routines and opcode tables. At present, it only contains
6411 Sparc and Z8000 routines. This will allow the assembler, debugger, and
6412 disassembler (binutils/objdump) to share these routines.
6413
6414 The libiberty library is now copylefted under the GNU Library General
6415 Public License. This allows more liberal use, and was done so libg++
6416 can use it. This makes no difference to GDB, since the Library License
6417 grants all the rights from the General Public License.
6418
6419 * Documentation
6420
6421 The file gdb-4.7/gdb/doc/stabs.texinfo is a (relatively) complete
6422 reference to the stabs symbol info used by the debugger. It is (as far
6423 as we know) the only published document on this fascinating topic. We
6424 encourage you to read it, compare it to the stabs information on your
6425 system, and send improvements on the document in general (to
6426 bug-gdb@prep.ai.mit.edu).
6427
6428 And, of course, many bugs have been fixed.
6429
6430
6431 *** Changes in GDB-4.6:
6432
6433 * Better support for C++ function names
6434
6435 GDB now accepts as input the "demangled form" of C++ overloaded function
6436 names and member function names, and can do command completion on such names
6437 (using TAB, TAB-TAB, and ESC-?). The names have to be quoted with a pair of
6438 single quotes. Examples are 'func (int, long)' and 'obj::operator==(obj&)'.
6439 Make use of command completion, it is your friend.
6440
6441 GDB also now accepts a variety of C++ mangled symbol formats. They are
6442 the GNU g++ style, the Cfront (ARM) style, and the Lucid (lcc) style.
6443 You can tell GDB which format to use by doing a 'set demangle-style {gnu,
6444 lucid, cfront, auto}'. 'gnu' is the default. Do a 'set demangle-style foo'
6445 for the list of formats.
6446
6447 * G++ symbol mangling problem
6448
6449 Recent versions of gcc have a bug in how they emit debugging information for
6450 C++ methods (when using dbx-style stabs). The file 'gcc.patch' (in this
6451 directory) can be applied to gcc to fix the problem. Alternatively, if you
6452 can't fix gcc, you can #define GCC_MANGLE_BUG when compling gdb/symtab.c. The
6453 usual symptom is difficulty with setting breakpoints on methods. GDB complains
6454 about the method being non-existent. (We believe that version 2.2.2 of GCC has
6455 this problem.)
6456
6457 * New 'maintenance' command
6458
6459 All of the commands related to hacking GDB internals have been moved out of
6460 the main command set, and now live behind the 'maintenance' command. This
6461 can also be abbreviated as 'mt'. The following changes were made:
6462
6463 dump-me -> maintenance dump-me
6464 info all-breakpoints -> maintenance info breakpoints
6465 printmsyms -> maintenance print msyms
6466 printobjfiles -> maintenance print objfiles
6467 printpsyms -> maintenance print psymbols
6468 printsyms -> maintenance print symbols
6469
6470 The following commands are new:
6471
6472 maintenance demangle Call internal GDB demangler routine to
6473 demangle a C++ link name and prints the result.
6474 maintenance print type Print a type chain for a given symbol
6475
6476 * Change to .gdbinit file processing
6477
6478 We now read the $HOME/.gdbinit file before processing the argv arguments
6479 (e.g. reading symbol files or core files). This allows global parameters to
6480 be set, which will apply during the symbol reading. The ./.gdbinit is still
6481 read after argv processing.
6482
6483 * New hosts supported
6484
6485 Solaris-2.0 !!! sparc-sun-solaris2 or sun4sol2
6486
6487 GNU/Linux support i386-unknown-linux or linux
6488
6489 We are also including code to support the HP/PA running BSD and HPUX. This
6490 is almost guaranteed not to work, as we didn't have time to test or build it
6491 for this release. We are including it so that the more adventurous (or
6492 masochistic) of you can play with it. We also had major problems with the
6493 fact that the compiler that we got from HP doesn't support the -g option.
6494 It costs extra.
6495
6496 * New targets supported
6497
6498 Hitachi H8/300 h8300-hitachi-hms or h8300hms
6499
6500 * More smarts about finding #include files
6501
6502 GDB now remembers the compilation directory for all include files, and for
6503 all files from which C is generated (like yacc and lex sources). This
6504 greatly improves GDB's ability to find yacc/lex sources, and include files,
6505 especially if you are debugging your program from a directory different from
6506 the one that contains your sources.
6507
6508 We also fixed a bug which caused difficulty with listing and setting
6509 breakpoints in include files which contain C code. (In the past, you had to
6510 try twice in order to list an include file that you hadn't looked at before.)
6511
6512 * Interesting infernals change
6513
6514 GDB now deals with arbitrary numbers of sections, where the symbols for each
6515 section must be relocated relative to that section's landing place in the
6516 target's address space. This work was needed to support ELF with embedded
6517 stabs used by Solaris-2.0.
6518
6519 * Bug fixes (of course!)
6520
6521 There have been loads of fixes for the following things:
6522 mips, rs6000, 29k/udi, m68k, g++, type handling, elf/dwarf, m88k,
6523 i960, stabs, DOS(GO32), procfs, etc...
6524
6525 See the ChangeLog for details.
6526
6527 *** Changes in GDB-4.5:
6528
6529 * New machines supported (host and target)
6530
6531 IBM RS6000 running AIX rs6000-ibm-aix or rs6000
6532
6533 SGI Irix-4.x mips-sgi-irix4 or iris4
6534
6535 * New malloc package
6536
6537 GDB now uses a new memory manager called mmalloc, based on gmalloc.
6538 Mmalloc is capable of handling mutiple heaps of memory. It is also
6539 capable of saving a heap to a file, and then mapping it back in later.
6540 This can be used to greatly speedup the startup of GDB by using a
6541 pre-parsed symbol table which lives in a mmalloc managed heap. For
6542 more details, please read mmalloc/mmalloc.texi.
6543
6544 * info proc
6545
6546 The 'info proc' command (SVR4 only) has been enhanced quite a bit. See
6547 'help info proc' for details.
6548
6549 * MIPS ecoff symbol table format
6550
6551 The code that reads MIPS symbol table format is now supported on all hosts.
6552 Thanks to MIPS for releasing the sym.h and symconst.h files to make this
6553 possible.
6554
6555 * File name changes for MS-DOS
6556
6557 Many files in the config directories have been renamed to make it easier to
6558 support GDB on MS-DOSe systems (which have very restrictive file name
6559 conventions :-( ). MS-DOSe host support (under DJ Delorie's GO32
6560 environment) is close to working but has some remaining problems. Note
6561 that debugging of DOS programs is not supported, due to limitations
6562 in the ``operating system'', but it can be used to host cross-debugging.
6563
6564 * Cross byte order fixes
6565
6566 Many fixes have been made to support cross debugging of Sparc and MIPS
6567 targets from hosts whose byte order differs.
6568
6569 * New -mapped and -readnow options
6570
6571 If memory-mapped files are available on your system through the 'mmap'
6572 system call, you can use the -mapped option on the `file' or
6573 `symbol-file' commands to cause GDB to write the symbols from your
6574 program into a reusable file. If the program you are debugging is
6575 called `/path/fred', the mapped symbol file will be `./fred.syms'.
6576 Future GDB debugging sessions will notice the presence of this file,
6577 and will quickly map in symbol information from it, rather than reading
6578 the symbol table from the executable program. Using the '-mapped'
6579 option in a GDB `file' or `symbol-file' command has the same effect as
6580 starting GDB with the '-mapped' command-line option.
6581
6582 You can cause GDB to read the entire symbol table immediately by using
6583 the '-readnow' option with any of the commands that load symbol table
6584 information (or on the GDB command line). This makes the command
6585 slower, but makes future operations faster.
6586
6587 The -mapped and -readnow options are typically combined in order to
6588 build a `fred.syms' file that contains complete symbol information.
6589 A simple GDB invocation to do nothing but build a `.syms' file for future
6590 use is:
6591
6592 gdb -batch -nx -mapped -readnow programname
6593
6594 The `.syms' file is specific to the host machine on which GDB is run.
6595 It holds an exact image of GDB's internal symbol table. It cannot be
6596 shared across multiple host platforms.
6597
6598 * longjmp() handling
6599
6600 GDB is now capable of stepping and nexting over longjmp(), _longjmp(), and
6601 siglongjmp() without losing control. This feature has not yet been ported to
6602 all systems. It currently works on many 386 platforms, all MIPS-based
6603 platforms (SGI, DECstation, etc), and Sun3/4.
6604
6605 * Solaris 2.0
6606
6607 Preliminary work has been put in to support the new Solaris OS from Sun. At
6608 this time, it can control and debug processes, but it is not capable of
6609 reading symbols.
6610
6611 * Bug fixes
6612
6613 As always, many many bug fixes. The major areas were with g++, and mipsread.
6614 People using the MIPS-based platforms should experience fewer mysterious
6615 crashes and trashed symbol tables.
6616
6617 *** Changes in GDB-4.4:
6618
6619 * New machines supported (host and target)
6620
6621 SCO Unix on i386 IBM PC clones i386-sco-sysv or i386sco
6622 (except core files)
6623 BSD Reno on Vax vax-dec-bsd
6624 Ultrix on Vax vax-dec-ultrix
6625
6626 * New machines supported (target)
6627
6628 AMD 29000 embedded, using EBMON a29k-none-none
6629
6630 * C++ support
6631
6632 GDB continues to improve its handling of C++. `References' work better.
6633 The demangler has also been improved, and now deals with symbols mangled as
6634 per the Annotated C++ Reference Guide.
6635
6636 GDB also now handles `stabs' symbol information embedded in MIPS
6637 `ecoff' symbol tables. Since the ecoff format was not easily
6638 extensible to handle new languages such as C++, this appeared to be a
6639 good way to put C++ debugging info into MIPS binaries. This option
6640 will be supported in the GNU C compiler, version 2, when it is
6641 released.
6642
6643 * New features for SVR4
6644
6645 GDB now handles SVR4 shared libraries, in the same fashion as SunOS
6646 shared libraries. Debugging dynamically linked programs should present
6647 only minor differences from debugging statically linked programs.
6648
6649 The `info proc' command will print out information about any process
6650 on an SVR4 system (including the one you are debugging). At the moment,
6651 it prints the address mappings of the process.
6652
6653 If you bring up GDB on another SVR4 system, please send mail to
6654 bug-gdb@prep.ai.mit.edu to let us know what changes were reqired (if any).
6655
6656 * Better dynamic linking support in SunOS
6657
6658 Reading symbols from shared libraries which contain debugging symbols
6659 now works properly. However, there remain issues such as automatic
6660 skipping of `transfer vector' code during function calls, which
6661 make it harder to debug code in a shared library, than to debug the
6662 same code linked statically.
6663
6664 * New Getopt
6665
6666 GDB is now using the latest `getopt' routines from the FSF. This
6667 version accepts the -- prefix for options with long names. GDB will
6668 continue to accept the old forms (-option and +option) as well.
6669 Various single letter abbreviations for options have been explicity
6670 added to the option table so that they won't get overshadowed in the
6671 future by other options that begin with the same letter.
6672
6673 * Bugs fixed
6674
6675 The `cleanup_undefined_types' bug that many of you noticed has been squashed.
6676 Many assorted bugs have been handled. Many more remain to be handled.
6677 See the various ChangeLog files (primarily in gdb and bfd) for details.
6678
6679
6680 *** Changes in GDB-4.3:
6681
6682 * New machines supported (host and target)
6683
6684 Amiga 3000 running Amix m68k-cbm-svr4 or amix
6685 NCR 3000 386 running SVR4 i386-ncr-svr4 or ncr3000
6686 Motorola Delta 88000 running Sys V m88k-motorola-sysv or delta88
6687
6688 * Almost SCO Unix support
6689
6690 We had hoped to support:
6691 SCO Unix on i386 IBM PC clones i386-sco-sysv or i386sco
6692 (except for core file support), but we discovered very late in the release
6693 that it has problems with process groups that render gdb unusable. Sorry
6694 about that. I encourage people to fix it and post the fixes.
6695
6696 * Preliminary ELF and DWARF support
6697
6698 GDB can read ELF object files on System V Release 4, and can handle
6699 debugging records for C, in DWARF format, in ELF files. This support
6700 is preliminary. If you bring up GDB on another SVR4 system, please
6701 send mail to bug-gdb@prep.ai.mit.edu to let us know what changes were
6702 reqired (if any).
6703
6704 * New Readline
6705
6706 GDB now uses the latest `readline' library. One user-visible change
6707 is that two tabs will list possible command completions, which previously
6708 required typing M-? (meta-question mark, or ESC ?).
6709
6710 * Bugs fixed
6711
6712 The `stepi' bug that many of you noticed has been squashed.
6713 Many bugs in C++ have been handled. Many more remain to be handled.
6714 See the various ChangeLog files (primarily in gdb and bfd) for details.
6715
6716 * State of the MIPS world (in case you wondered):
6717
6718 GDB can understand the symbol tables emitted by the compilers
6719 supplied by most vendors of MIPS-based machines, including DEC. These
6720 symbol tables are in a format that essentially nobody else uses.
6721
6722 Some versions of gcc come with an assembler post-processor called
6723 mips-tfile. This program is required if you want to do source-level
6724 debugging of gcc-compiled programs. I believe FSF does not ship
6725 mips-tfile with gcc version 1, but it will eventually come with gcc
6726 version 2.
6727
6728 Debugging of g++ output remains a problem. g++ version 1.xx does not
6729 really support it at all. (If you're lucky, you should be able to get
6730 line numbers and stack traces to work, but no parameters or local
6731 variables.) With some work it should be possible to improve the
6732 situation somewhat.
6733
6734 When gcc version 2 is released, you will have somewhat better luck.
6735 However, even then you will get confusing results for inheritance and
6736 methods.
6737
6738 We will eventually provide full debugging of g++ output on
6739 DECstations. This will probably involve some kind of stabs-in-ecoff
6740 encapulation, but the details have not been worked out yet.
6741
6742
6743 *** Changes in GDB-4.2:
6744
6745 * Improved configuration
6746
6747 Only one copy of `configure' exists now, and it is not self-modifying.
6748 Porting BFD is simpler.
6749
6750 * Stepping improved
6751
6752 The `step' and `next' commands now only stop at the first instruction
6753 of a source line. This prevents the multiple stops that used to occur
6754 in switch statements, for-loops, etc. `Step' continues to stop if a
6755 function that has debugging information is called within the line.
6756
6757 * Bug fixing
6758
6759 Lots of small bugs fixed. More remain.
6760
6761 * New host supported (not target)
6762
6763 Intel 386 PC clone running Mach i386-none-mach
6764
6765
6766 *** Changes in GDB-4.1:
6767
6768 * Multiple source language support
6769
6770 GDB now has internal scaffolding to handle several source languages.
6771 It determines the type of each source file from its filename extension,
6772 and will switch expression parsing and number formatting to match the
6773 language of the function in the currently selected stack frame.
6774 You can also specifically set the language to be used, with
6775 `set language c' or `set language modula-2'.
6776
6777 * GDB and Modula-2
6778
6779 GDB now has preliminary support for the GNU Modula-2 compiler,
6780 currently under development at the State University of New York at
6781 Buffalo. Development of both GDB and the GNU Modula-2 compiler will
6782 continue through the fall of 1991 and into 1992.
6783
6784 Other Modula-2 compilers are currently not supported, and attempting to
6785 debug programs compiled with them will likely result in an error as the
6786 symbol table is read. Feel free to work on it, though!
6787
6788 There are hooks in GDB for strict type checking and range checking,
6789 in the `Modula-2 philosophy', but they do not currently work.
6790
6791 * set write on/off
6792
6793 GDB can now write to executable and core files (e.g. patch
6794 a variable's value). You must turn this switch on, specify
6795 the file ("exec foo" or "core foo"), *then* modify it, e.g.
6796 by assigning a new value to a variable. Modifications take
6797 effect immediately.
6798
6799 * Automatic SunOS shared library reading
6800
6801 When you run your program, GDB automatically determines where its
6802 shared libraries (if any) have been loaded, and reads their symbols.
6803 The `share' command is no longer needed. This also works when
6804 examining core files.
6805
6806 * set listsize
6807
6808 You can specify the number of lines that the `list' command shows.
6809 The default is 10.
6810
6811 * New machines supported (host and target)
6812
6813 SGI Iris (MIPS) running Irix V3: mips-sgi-irix or iris
6814 Sony NEWS (68K) running NEWSOS 3.x: m68k-sony-sysv or news
6815 Ultracomputer (29K) running Sym1: a29k-nyu-sym1 or ultra3
6816
6817 * New hosts supported (not targets)
6818
6819 IBM RT/PC: romp-ibm-aix or rtpc
6820
6821 * New targets supported (not hosts)
6822
6823 AMD 29000 embedded with COFF a29k-none-coff
6824 AMD 29000 embedded with a.out a29k-none-aout
6825 Ultracomputer remote kernel debug a29k-nyu-kern
6826
6827 * New remote interfaces
6828
6829 AMD 29000 Adapt
6830 AMD 29000 Minimon
6831
6832
6833 *** Changes in GDB-4.0:
6834
6835 * New Facilities
6836
6837 Wide output is wrapped at good places to make the output more readable.
6838
6839 Gdb now supports cross-debugging from a host machine of one type to a
6840 target machine of another type. Communication with the target system
6841 is over serial lines. The ``target'' command handles connecting to the
6842 remote system; the ``load'' command will download a program into the
6843 remote system. Serial stubs for the m68k and i386 are provided. Gdb
6844 also supports debugging of realtime processes running under VxWorks,
6845 using SunRPC Remote Procedure Calls over TCP/IP to talk to a debugger
6846 stub on the target system.
6847
6848 New CPUs supported include the AMD 29000 and Intel 960.
6849
6850 GDB now reads object files and symbol tables via a ``binary file''
6851 library, which allows a single copy of GDB to debug programs of multiple
6852 object file types such as a.out and coff.
6853
6854 There is now a GDB reference card in "doc/refcard.tex". (Make targets
6855 refcard.dvi and refcard.ps are available to format it).
6856
6857
6858 * Control-Variable user interface simplified
6859
6860 All variables that control the operation of the debugger can be set
6861 by the ``set'' command, and displayed by the ``show'' command.
6862
6863 For example, ``set prompt new-gdb=>'' will change your prompt to new-gdb=>.
6864 ``Show prompt'' produces the response:
6865 Gdb's prompt is new-gdb=>.
6866
6867 What follows are the NEW set commands. The command ``help set'' will
6868 print a complete list of old and new set commands. ``help set FOO''
6869 will give a longer description of the variable FOO. ``show'' will show
6870 all of the variable descriptions and their current settings.
6871
6872 confirm on/off: Enables warning questions for operations that are
6873 hard to recover from, e.g. rerunning the program while
6874 it is already running. Default is ON.
6875
6876 editing on/off: Enables EMACS style command line editing
6877 of input. Previous lines can be recalled with
6878 control-P, the current line can be edited with control-B,
6879 you can search for commands with control-R, etc.
6880 Default is ON.
6881
6882 history filename NAME: NAME is where the gdb command history
6883 will be stored. The default is .gdb_history,
6884 or the value of the environment variable
6885 GDBHISTFILE.
6886
6887 history size N: The size, in commands, of the command history. The
6888 default is 256, or the value of the environment variable
6889 HISTSIZE.
6890
6891 history save on/off: If this value is set to ON, the history file will
6892 be saved after exiting gdb. If set to OFF, the
6893 file will not be saved. The default is OFF.
6894
6895 history expansion on/off: If this value is set to ON, then csh-like
6896 history expansion will be performed on
6897 command line input. The default is OFF.
6898
6899 radix N: Sets the default radix for input and output. It can be set
6900 to 8, 10, or 16. Note that the argument to "radix" is interpreted
6901 in the current radix, so "set radix 10" is always a no-op.
6902
6903 height N: This integer value is the number of lines on a page. Default
6904 is 24, the current `stty rows'' setting, or the ``li#''
6905 setting from the termcap entry matching the environment
6906 variable TERM.
6907
6908 width N: This integer value is the number of characters on a line.
6909 Default is 80, the current `stty cols'' setting, or the ``co#''
6910 setting from the termcap entry matching the environment
6911 variable TERM.
6912
6913 Note: ``set screensize'' is obsolete. Use ``set height'' and
6914 ``set width'' instead.
6915
6916 print address on/off: Print memory addresses in various command displays,
6917 such as stack traces and structure values. Gdb looks
6918 more ``symbolic'' if you turn this off; it looks more
6919 ``machine level'' with it on. Default is ON.
6920
6921 print array on/off: Prettyprint arrays. New convenient format! Default
6922 is OFF.
6923
6924 print demangle on/off: Print C++ symbols in "source" form if on,
6925 "raw" form if off.
6926
6927 print asm-demangle on/off: Same, for assembler level printouts
6928 like instructions.
6929
6930 print vtbl on/off: Prettyprint C++ virtual function tables. Default is OFF.
6931
6932
6933 * Support for Epoch Environment.
6934
6935 The epoch environment is a version of Emacs v18 with windowing. One
6936 new command, ``inspect'', is identical to ``print'', except that if you
6937 are running in the epoch environment, the value is printed in its own
6938 window.
6939
6940
6941 * Support for Shared Libraries
6942
6943 GDB can now debug programs and core files that use SunOS shared libraries.
6944 Symbols from a shared library cannot be referenced
6945 before the shared library has been linked with the program (this
6946 happens after you type ``run'' and before the function main() is entered).
6947 At any time after this linking (including when examining core files
6948 from dynamically linked programs), gdb reads the symbols from each
6949 shared library when you type the ``sharedlibrary'' command.
6950 It can be abbreviated ``share''.
6951
6952 sharedlibrary REGEXP: Load shared object library symbols for files
6953 matching a unix regular expression. No argument
6954 indicates to load symbols for all shared libraries.
6955
6956 info sharedlibrary: Status of loaded shared libraries.
6957
6958
6959 * Watchpoints
6960
6961 A watchpoint stops execution of a program whenever the value of an
6962 expression changes. Checking for this slows down execution
6963 tremendously whenever you are in the scope of the expression, but is
6964 quite useful for catching tough ``bit-spreader'' or pointer misuse
6965 problems. Some machines such as the 386 have hardware for doing this
6966 more quickly, and future versions of gdb will use this hardware.
6967
6968 watch EXP: Set a watchpoint (breakpoint) for an expression.
6969
6970 info watchpoints: Information about your watchpoints.
6971
6972 delete N: Deletes watchpoint number N (same as breakpoints).
6973 disable N: Temporarily turns off watchpoint number N (same as breakpoints).
6974 enable N: Re-enables watchpoint number N (same as breakpoints).
6975
6976
6977 * C++ multiple inheritance
6978
6979 When used with a GCC version 2 compiler, GDB supports multiple inheritance
6980 for C++ programs.
6981
6982 * C++ exception handling
6983
6984 Gdb now supports limited C++ exception handling. Besides the existing
6985 ability to breakpoint on an exception handler, gdb can breakpoint on
6986 the raising of an exception (before the stack is peeled back to the
6987 handler's context).
6988
6989 catch FOO: If there is a FOO exception handler in the dynamic scope,
6990 set a breakpoint to catch exceptions which may be raised there.
6991 Multiple exceptions (``catch foo bar baz'') may be caught.
6992
6993 info catch: Lists all exceptions which may be caught in the
6994 current stack frame.
6995
6996
6997 * Minor command changes
6998
6999 The command ``call func (arg, arg, ...)'' now acts like the print
7000 command, except it does not print or save a value if the function's result
7001 is void. This is similar to dbx usage.
7002
7003 The ``up'' and ``down'' commands now always print the frame they end up
7004 at; ``up-silently'' and `down-silently'' can be used in scripts to change
7005 frames without printing.
7006
7007 * New directory command
7008
7009 'dir' now adds directories to the FRONT of the source search path.
7010 The path starts off empty. Source files that contain debug information
7011 about the directory in which they were compiled can be found even
7012 with an empty path; Sun CC and GCC include this information. If GDB can't
7013 find your source file in the current directory, type "dir .".
7014
7015 * Configuring GDB for compilation
7016
7017 For normal use, type ``./configure host''. See README or gdb.texinfo
7018 for more details.
7019
7020 GDB now handles cross debugging. If you are remotely debugging between
7021 two different machines, type ``./configure host -target=targ''.
7022 Host is the machine where GDB will run; targ is the machine
7023 where the program that you are debugging will run.