GDB

So finally Doug Rabson has make it. It’s written with D Language and is in git here.

It seems that John Baldwin has published a debugging helper script for gdb, which is interesting to have a look at:

http://people.freebsd.org/~jhb/gdb.6

Maybe we can extend it to have some VM inspection function as well? :-)

marcel has finally imported gdb into FreeBSD-base. Now we can debug kernels again.

David O’Brien has just imported binutils 2.15 snapshot into FreeBSD src repository. What’s more, he stated that he will do gdb 6.x import soon. This will drastically improve the debug and development environment in FreeBSD.

It seems (still can’t access to the Internet right now, however, HTTP and cvsup works) that OpenBSD has imported gdb 6.1 into their source tree. I am not sure whether they did some hacks to the source repository (from cvsup result, there is not), but the result is really strange. It seems that the last import was done by using a “cvs add -rCYGNUS” and not “cvs import”…

I hope FreeBSD can import a newer gdb ASAP, as well as gcc 3.4 series.

To quote Matthew Dillon:

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    You can actually run gdb on a live kernel like this:

    gdb -k /dev/mem /path/to/kernel.debug

    You can then use the 'proc' command to switch to a process (give it a
    pid), and do a stack backtrace.  That part only really works if the
    process is blocked on something (i.e. not running).

    But you can also dig around kernel globals and various data structures
    and that can be quite useful on a live system.

					-Matt
					Matthew Dillon 
					<dillon@backplane.com>