[EXT] Re: Slow "symbol-file" when using GDB 12.1 on Windows hosts

[Pedro Alves]

On 2023-04-03 5:48 p.m., Adrian Oltean via Gdb wrote:

> I managed to identify what's causing the described behavior. The CSC  folder is actually
> accessed indirectly because of the fact that a network share is attempted to be 
> accessed by GDB on Windows - see paths like " \\lib\debug" in my previous emails.
> 
> The fact that GDB is trying to access (most likely invalid in almost all setups) network
> shares like " \\lib\debug" on Windows hosts, I'm pretty sure the slowdown isn't
> happening only for me (actually, all PCs from our organization). Note that this path
> is the one specific to latest GDB 12 build delivered by ARM:
> (gdb) show debug-file-directory
> The directory where separate debug symbols are searched for is "\\lib\debug".
> 
> For GDB 10 I see:
> (gdb) show debug-file-directory
> The directory where separate debug symbols are searched for is "c:\mnt\workspace\workspace\gcc-10-pipeline\jenkins-gcc-10-pipeline-338_20211018_1634516203\install-mingw\lib\debug".
> 
> As far as I can tell, ARM changed something in their build environment causing this
> unwanted effect. With this findings, I decided to workaround the problem by
> setting debug-file-directory to an empty value once GDB starts-up.

"(gdb) show configuration" may help determine whether GDB was configured with such a
bad path.

Could be GDB is making up that path somehow, by concating "\" with "\lib\debug", for example.
If so, that might be fixed in GDB 13, as path joining was refactored/tweaked in that
release.