Release 6.6 of the GNU Project Debugger

[Posted December 20, 2006 by cook]

Release 6.6 of the GNU Project Debugger (GDB) has been announced. GDB is one of the classic GNU software projects, it has been around for a full two decades. GDB even comes with its own song. The release note explains GDB:

GDB is a source-level debugger for Ada, C, C++, Objective-C, Pascal and many other languages. GDB can target (i.e., debug programs running on) more than a dozen different processor architectures, and GDB itself can run on most popular GNU/Linux, Unix and Microsoft Windows variants.

[GDB] One of the more powerful capabilities of GDB is the ability to debug programs running on a remote target that is connected to the main host via a serial cable or a tcp/ip connection. This is an area of GDB that is undergoing a lot of development work. Changes in GDB 6.6 include:

New Xtensa and Cell Broadband Engine SPU targets have been added.
GDB can work as a cross-debugger targeting native Windows or Cygwin platforms.
Windows and Cygwin debugging are now supported by the GDB remote stub.
The "set trust-readonly-sections" command has been fixed after being broken for several releases.
GNU/Linux Thread Local Storage no longer depends on symbolic debug information.
There are a number of new substitute-path commands for managing source directories.
There are new set and show trace-commands capabilities for working with CLI commands.
There is a new qSupported remote packet that can query a remote client about its features.
The qPart:auxv:read: remote packet has been replaced by the more efficient qXfer:auxv:read: packet.
Some obsolete features have been removed.

Plans are also underway to add reversible debugging to GDB: "Reversible debugging (the ability to "step backwards" through a program) is an obviously powerful tool. GDB does not support it today, but the foundations have been laid, and the GDB maintainers are looking for contributors interested in expanding those foundations." Contact the GDB Steering Committee if you would like to work on this project.

GDB 6.6 is available for download here. It is advisable to look over the list of known problems before installing the software. Your editor tried a test build of GDB 6.6 on a machine running the Ubuntu Breezy Badger distribution. The build/install process involved the standard configure, make and make install steps, it worked without any problems. The newly built GDB installed itself in /usr/local/bin and works alongside the already installed (version 6.3) /usr/bin/gdb from the Ubuntu package. A test run of GDB 6.6 on a simple C program worked as expected.

For more information on GDB, take a look at the extensive online documentation, a good place to start is Debugging with GDB. Unlike many new open-source software releases, the documentation has been kept up to date with the newest release.