Re: gdb6.0 and statically linked threaded programs

[Daniel Jacobowitz <drow at mvista dot com>]

On Wed, Oct 22, 2003 at 03:59:53PM -0700, Todd.Kneisel@Bull.com wrote:
> I have built gdb6.0 and am having trouble using it to debug a
> threaded program that is statically linked with the linuxthreads
> pthread library. Gdb does not detect the creation of threads,
> it traps signal 32 that the pthread library uses to restart
> threads, and gets a SIGINT instead of stopping at a breakpoint
> in a thread.
> 
> If I dynamically link my program, everything works fine. For
> a number of reasons, I need to link my program statically.
> 
> I've begun looking at the gdb code and found the following
> text in a comment in the thread_db_mourn_inferior function:
> 
>    At present,
>    debugging a statically-linked threaded program is broken, but
>    the check is added below in the event that it is fixed in the
>    future.
> 
> Is anyone working on fixing this?  Or can anyone provide more
> details about how or why it's broken?

It's broken because the thread layer is never initialized.  I'm waiting
for some of the changes to the target stack to see if they make it
easier to fix this - the last few things I've tried were simply gross
beyond words.

In the mean time I recommend using gdbserver instead of native gdb.

-- 
Daniel Jacobowitz
MontaVista Software                         Debian GNU/Linux Developer