pending breakpoints without any symbols loaded yet

Pedro Alves pedro@codesourcery.com
Thu Apr 3 20:24:00 GMT 2008


Hi all,

This is a follow up to a discussion that started a few months ago
related to setting breakpoints in shared lib when you don't have
any symbols in the main executable.  This is more visible
on Windows when you want debugging a dll you build with gcc that
is loaded by a stripped application built with MSVC.  We can't
debug the MSVC built executable, but we should be able
to debug the code in the dll.  Users should be able to set
breakpoints in the dll before it gets loaded, but gdb refuses
to, claiming:

(gdb) b func_in_dll
No symbol table is loaded.  Use the "file" command.

Original patch and discussion here:
[Debugging a Vlc dll with GDB.]
http://sourceware.org/ml/gdb-patches/2007-12/msg00112.html

Coincidently, Matt Rice was asking on IRC why he couldn't
set pending breakpoints in his .gdbinit file, which
made me come back to the issue.  It's exactly the same
checks in gdb.  This patch should also fix his use case.

At the time of that thread, I proposed a patch the removes the
limitation, by letting the user set pending breakpoints even
if no symbols are loaded yet, but I also changed the
messages we output, but in a form not everyone liked.  As
we were discussing then, the messages gdb prints aren't
100% accurate -- if we let the user set pending breakpoints
before an exec file is loaded, the question we ask is still
"Make breakapoints pending on future shared library load?".  I
spent quite some time staring at the messages we output, and
trying to come up with a good generic one, but the ones
I came up with, still had this feeling they would be
rejected again.  :-)

So, this time I propose a code change only.  Let's make
message changes separately.

Here goes the patch.  Testcase included.  Tested on
x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu.

-- 
Pedro Alves
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