What is GDB?

GDB, the GNU Project debugger, allows you to see what is going on `inside' another program while it executes -- or what another program was doing at the moment it crashed.

GDB can do four main kinds of things (plus other things in support of these) to help you catch bugs in the act:

• Start your program, specifying anything that might affect its behavior.
• Make your program stop on specified conditions.
• Examine what has happened, when your program has stopped.
• Change things in your program, so you can experiment with correcting the effects of one bug and go on to learn about another.

What Languages does GDB Support?

• Ada
• Assembly
• C
• C++
• D
• Fortran
• Go
• Objective-C
• OpenCL
• Modula-2
• Pascal
• Rust

GDB version 10.2

An errata list (PROBLEMS) and documentation are also available.

News

Apr 25th, 2021: GDB 10.2 Released!

The latest version of GDB, version 10.2, is available for download.

This is a minor corrective release over GDB 10.1, fixing the following issues:

• PR remote/26614 (AddressSanitizer: heap-use-after-free of extended_remote_target in remote_async_inferior_event_handler)
• PR gdb/26828 (SIGSEGV in follow_die_offset dwarf2/read.c:22950)
• PR gdb/26861 (internal-error: void target_mourn_inferior(ptid_t): Assertion `ptid == inferior_ptid' failed. OS: Mac OSX Catalina; Compiler: GCC; Language: C)
• PR gdb/26876 (gdb error: internal-error: Unknown CFA rule when debugging the linux kernel with qemu)
• PR breakpoints/26881 (infrun.c:6384: internal-error: void process_event_stop_test(execution_control_state*): Assertion `ecs->event_thread->control.exception_resume_breakpoint != NULL' failed)
• PR gdb/26901 (Array subscript fails with flexible array member without size)
• PR tui/26973 (gdb crashes when not including the status window in a new layout)
• PR python/26974 (Wrong Value.format_string docu for static members argument)
• PR breakpoints/27009 ([s390] GDB branches randomly for BC instruction while displaced stepping)
• PR tdep/27015 (ARC: "eret" value is collected from the wrong data in register cache)
• PR backtrace/27147 ([GNU/Linux, sparc64] GDB is unable to print full stack trace (got "previous frame inner to this frame" errors))
• PR rust/27194 (put rust demangler on 10.x branch)
• PR threads/27239 (gdb/cp-support.c:1619:(.text+0x5502): relocation truncated to fit: R_X86_64_PC32 against undefined symbol `TLS init function for thread_local_segv_handler')
• PR breakpoints/27330 (nextoverthrow.exp FAILs on arm-none-eabi)
• PR symtab/27333 ([dwarf-5] abort on unhandled DW_TAG_type_unit in process_psymtab_comp_unit)
• PR fortran/27341 ([dwarf-5] FAIL: gdb.fortran/function-calls.exp: p derived_types_and_module_calls::pass_cart_nd(c_nd))
• PR tdep/27369 (ARC: Stepping over atomic instruction sequences loops infinitely)
• PR build/27385 (Cannot compile arc.c with gcc-4.8 (error: no matching function for call to 'std::pair...'))
• PR gdb/27435 (Attach on solaris segfaults GDB)
• PR build/27535 (amd64-linux-siginfo.c fails to compile after updating to glibc-2.33 headers)
• PR build/27536 (aarch64-linux-hw-point.c fails to compile after updating to glibc-2.33)
• PR symtab/27541 (gdb crashes on "file -readnow")
• PR gdb/27750 (local variables have wrong address and values on sparc64)
• PR varobj/27757 (-var-list-children coredump)

October 24th, 2020: GDB 10.1 Released!

The latest version of GDB, version 10.1, is available for download.

This version of GDB includes the following changes and enhancements:

• Support for debugging new targets:
  • BPF (bpf-unknown-none)
• GDBserver support for the following targets:
  • ARC GNU/Linux
  • RISC-V GNU/Linux
• Multi-target debugging support (experimental)
• Support for debuginfod, an HTTP server for distributing ELF/DWARF debugging information as well as source code.
• Support for debugging a 32-bit Windows program using a 64-bit Windows GDB.
• Support for building GDB with GNU Guile 3.0 and 2.2 (in addition to 2.0)
• Improved performance during startup through the use of threading during symbol table loading (an optional feature in GDB 9, now enabled by default in GDB 10).
• Various enhancements to the Python and Guile APIs
• Various TUI Mode fixes and enhancements.
• Other miscellaneous enhancements:
  • Detection when attaching to a process of a mismatch between this process and the executable previously loaded into GDB.
  • Support for default arguments for "alias" commands.
• GDBserver support for the following host triplets has been removed:
  • i[34567]86-*-lynxos*
  • powerpc-*-lynxos*
  • i[34567]86-*-nto*
  • bfin-*-*linux*
  • crisv32-*-linux*
  • cris-*-linux*
  • m32r*-*-linux*
  • tilegx-*-linux*
  • arm*-*-mingw32ce*
  • i[34567]86-*-mingw32ce*

See the NEWS file for a more complete and detailed list of what this release includes.

September 13th, 2020: GDB 10 branch created

The GDB 10 branch (gdb-10-branch) has been created. To check out a copy of the branch use:

git clone --branch gdb-10-branch git://sourceware.org/git/binutils-gdb.git

Nov 28, 2006: Reversible Debugging

The GDB maintainers are looking for contributors interested in reversible debugging.