2013-11-11 Catherine Moore <clm@codesourcery.com>
[deliverable/binutils-gdb.git] / gdb / NEWS
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1 What has changed in GDB?
2 (Organized release by release)
3
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4*** Changes since GDB 7.6
5
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6* GDB now supports Fission DWP file format version 2.
7 http://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/DebugFission
8
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9* New convenience function "$_isvoid", to check whether an expression
10 is void. A void expression is an expression where the type of the
11 result is "void". For example, some convenience variables may be
12 "void" when evaluated (e.g., "$_exitcode" before the execution of
13 the program being debugged; or an undefined convenience variable).
14 Another example, when calling a function whose return type is
15 "void".
16
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17* The "maintenance print objfiles" command now takes an optional regexp.
18
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19* The "catch syscall" command now works on arm*-linux* targets.
20
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21* GDB now consistently shows "<not saved>" when printing values of
22 registers the debug info indicates have not been saved in the frame
23 and there's nowhere to retrieve them from
24 (callee-saved/call-clobbered registers):
25
26 (gdb) p $rax
27 $1 = <not saved>
28
29 (gdb) info registers rax
30 rax <not saved>
31
32 Before, the former would print "<optimized out>", and the latter
33 "*value not available*".
34
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35* Python scripting
36
37 ** Frame filters and frame decorators have been added.
f76c27b5 38 ** Temporary breakpoints are now supported.
1e611234 39
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40* New targets
41
42Nios II ELF nios2*-*-elf
43Nios II GNU/Linux nios2*-*-linux
42059f0e 44Texas Instruments MSP430 msp430*-*-elf
a1217d97 45
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46* Removed native configurations
47
48Support for these a.out NetBSD and OpenBSD obsolete configurations has
49been removed. ELF variants of these configurations are kept supported.
50
51arm*-*-netbsd* but arm*-*-netbsdelf* is kept supported.
52i[34567]86-*-netbsd* but i[34567]86-*-netbsdelf* is kept supported.
53i[34567]86-*-openbsd[0-2].* but i[34567]86-*-openbsd* is kept supported.
54i[34567]86-*-openbsd3.[0-3]
55m68*-*-netbsd* but m68*-*-netbsdelf* is kept supported.
56sparc-*-netbsd* but sparc-*-netbsdelf* is kept supported.
57vax-*-netbsd* but vax-*-netbsdelf* is kept supported.
58
bd712aed 59* New commands:
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60catch rethrow
61 Like "catch throw", but catches a re-thrown exception.
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62maint check-psymtabs
63 Renamed from old "maint check-symtabs".
64maint check-symtabs
65 Perform consistency checks on symtabs.
66maint expand-symtabs
67 Expand symtabs matching an optional regexp.
b340913d 68
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69show configuration
70 Display the details of GDB configure-time options.
71
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72maint set|show per-command
73maint set|show per-command space
74maint set|show per-command time
75maint set|show per-command symtab
76 Enable display of per-command gdb resource usage.
77
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78remove-symbol-file FILENAME
79remove-symbol-file -a ADDRESS
80 Remove a symbol file added via add-symbol-file. The file to remove
81 can be identified by its filename or by an address that lies within
82 the boundaries of this symbol file in memory.
83
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84* New options
85
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86set debug symfile off|on
87show debug symfile
88 Control display of debugging info regarding reading symbol files and
89 symbol tables within those files
90
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91set print raw frame-arguments
92show print raw frame-arguments
93 Set/show whether to print frame arguments in raw mode,
94 disregarding any defined pretty-printers.
95
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96set remote trace-status-packet
97show remote trace-status-packet
98 Set/show the use of remote protocol qTStatus packet.
99
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100set debug nios2
101show debug nios2
102 Control display of debugging messages related to Nios II targets.
103
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104set range-stepping
105show range-stepping
106 Control whether target-assisted range stepping is enabled.
107
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108set startup-with-shell
109show startup-with-shell
110 Specifies whether Unix child processes are started via a shell or
111 directly.
112
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113* You can now use a literal value 'unlimited' for options that
114 interpret 0 or -1 as meaning "unlimited". E.g., "set
115 trace-buffer-size unlimited" is now an alias for "set
116 trace-buffer-size -1" and "set height unlimited" is now an alias for
117 "set height 0".
118
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119* The "set debug symtab-create" debugging option of GDB has been changed to
120 accept a verbosity level. 0 means "off", 1 provides basic debugging
121 output, and values of 2 or greater provides more verbose output.
122
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123* New command-line options
124--configuration
125 Display the details of GDB configure-time options.
126
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127* The command 'tsave' can now support new option '-ctf' to save trace
128 buffer in Common Trace Format.
129
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130* Newly installed $prefix/bin/gcore acts as a shell interface for the
131 GDB command gcore.
132
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133* GDB now implements the the C++ 'typeid' operator.
134
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135* The new convenience variable $_exception holds the exception being
136 thrown or caught at an exception-related catchpoint.
137
138* The exception-related catchpoints, like "catch throw", now accept a
139 regular expression which can be used to filter exceptions by type.
140
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141* The new convenience variable $_exitsignal is automatically set to
142 the terminating signal number when the program being debugged dies
143 due to an uncaught signal.
144
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145* MI changes
146
147 ** The -trace-save MI command can optionally save trace buffer in Common
148 Trace Format now.
149
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150 ** The new command -dprintf-insert sets a dynamic printf breakpoint.
151
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152 ** The command -data-list-register-values now accepts an optional
153 "--skip-unavailable" option. When used, only the available registers
154 are displayed.
155
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156 ** The new command -trace-frame-collected dumps collected variables,
157 computed expressions, tvars, memory and registers in a traceframe.
158
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159 ** The commands -stack-list-locals, -stack-list-arguments and
160 -stack-list-variables now accept an option "--skip-unavailable".
161 When used, only the available locals or arguments are displayed.
162
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163 ** The -exec-run command now accepts an optional "--start" option.
164 When used, the command follows the same semantics as the "start"
165 command, stopping the program's execution at the start of its
166 main subprogram.
167
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168 ** The new commands -catch-assert and -catch-exceptions insert
169 catchpoints stopping the program when Ada exceptions are raised.
170
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171* New system-wide configuration scripts
172 A GDB installation now provides scripts suitable for use as system-wide
173 configuration scripts for the following systems:
174 ** ElinOS
175 ** Wind River Linux
176
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177* GDB now supports target-assigned range stepping with remote targets.
178 This improves the performance of stepping source lines by reducing
179 the number of control packets from/to GDB. See "New remote packets"
180 below.
181
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182* GDB now understands the element 'tvar' in the XML traceframe info.
183 It has the id of the collected trace state variables.
184
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185* On S/390 targets that provide the transactional-execution feature,
186 the program interruption transaction diagnostic block (TDB) is now
187 represented as a number of additional "registers" in GDB.
188
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189* New remote packets
190
191vCont;r
192
193 The vCont packet supports a new 'r' action, that tells the remote
194 stub to step through an address range itself, without GDB
195 involvemement at each single-step.
196
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197qXfer:libraries-svr4:read's annex
198 The previously unused annex of the qXfer:libraries-svr4:read packet
199 is now used to support passing an argument list. The remote stub
200 reports support for this argument list to GDB's qSupported query.
201 The defined arguments are "start" and "prev", used to reduce work
202 necessary for library list updating, resulting in significant
203 speedup.
204
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205* New features in the GDB remote stub, GDBserver
206
207 ** GDBserver now supports target-assisted range stepping. Currently
208 enabled on x86/x86_64 GNU/Linux targets.
209
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210 ** GDBserver now adds element 'tvar' in the XML in the reply to
211 'qXfer:traceframe-info:read'. It has the id of the collected
212 trace state variables.
213
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214 ** GDBserver now supports hardware watchpoints on the MIPS GNU/Linux
215 target.
216
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217* New 'z' formatter for printing and examining memory, this displays the
218 value as hexadecimal zero padded on the left to the size of the type.
219
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220* GDB can now use Windows x64 unwinding data.
221
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222* The "set remotebaud" command has been replaced by "set serial baud".
223 Similarly, "show remotebaud" has been replaced by "show serial baud".
224 The "set remotebaud" and "show remotebaud" commands are still available
225 to provide backward compatibility with older versions of GDB.
226
2d450646 227*** Changes in GDB 7.6
80c8d323 228
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229* Target record has been renamed to record-full.
230 Record/replay is now enabled with the "record full" command.
231 This also affects settings that are associated with full record/replay
232 that have been moved from "set/show record" to "set/show record full":
233
234set|show record full insn-number-max
235set|show record full stop-at-limit
236set|show record full memory-query
237
238* A new record target "record-btrace" has been added. The new target
239 uses hardware support to record the control-flow of a process. It
240 does not support replaying the execution, but it implements the
241 below new commands for investigating the recorded execution log.
242 This new recording method can be enabled using:
243
244record btrace
245
246 The "record-btrace" target is only available on Intel Atom processors
247 and requires a Linux kernel 2.6.32 or later.
248
249* Two new commands have been added for record/replay to give information
250 about the recorded execution without having to replay the execution.
251 The commands are only supported by "record btrace".
252
253record instruction-history prints the execution history at
254 instruction granularity
255
256record function-call-history prints the execution history at
257 function granularity
258
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259* New native configurations
260
51d66578 261ARM AArch64 GNU/Linux aarch64*-*-linux-gnu
543bf33d 262FreeBSD/powerpc powerpc*-*-freebsd
4f4352f7 263x86_64/Cygwin x86_64-*-cygwin*
ea5f3910 264Tilera TILE-Gx GNU/Linux tilegx*-*-linux-gnu
543bf33d 265
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266* New targets
267
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268ARM AArch64 aarch64*-*-elf
269ARM AArch64 GNU/Linux aarch64*-*-linux
249729c4 270Lynx 178 PowerPC powerpc-*-lynx*178
3c095f49 271x86_64/Cygwin x86_64-*-cygwin*
ea5f3910 272Tilera TILE-Gx GNU/Linux tilegx*-*-linux
249729c4 273
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274* If the configured location of system.gdbinit file (as given by the
275 --with-system-gdbinit option at configure time) is in the
276 data-directory (as specified by --with-gdb-datadir at configure
277 time) or in one of its subdirectories, then GDB will look for the
278 system-wide init file in the directory specified by the
279 --data-directory command-line option.
280
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281* New command line options:
282
283-nh Disables auto-loading of ~/.gdbinit, but still executes all the
284 other initialization files, unlike -nx which disables all of them.
285
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286* Removed command line options
287
288-epoch This was used by the gdb mode in Epoch, an ancient fork of
289 Emacs.
290
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291* The 'ptype' and 'whatis' commands now accept an argument to control
292 type formatting.
293
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294* 'info proc' now works on some core files.
295
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296* Python scripting
297
298 ** Vectors can be created with gdb.Type.vector.
299
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300 ** Python's atexit.register now works in GDB.
301
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302 ** Types can be pretty-printed via a Python API.
303
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304 ** Python 3 is now supported (in addition to Python 2.4 or later)
305
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306 ** New class gdb.Architecture exposes GDB's internal representation
307 of architecture in the Python API.
308
309 ** New method Frame.architecture returns the gdb.Architecture object
310 corresponding to the frame's architecture.
311
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312* New Python-based convenience functions:
313
314 ** $_memeq(buf1, buf2, length)
315 ** $_streq(str1, str2)
316 ** $_strlen(str)
317 ** $_regex(str, regex)
318
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319* The 'cd' command now defaults to using '~' (the home directory) if not
320 given an argument.
321
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322* The C++ ABI now defaults to the GNU v3 ABI. This has been the
323 default for GCC since November 2000.
324
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325* The command 'forward-search' can now be abbreviated as 'fo'.
326
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327* The command 'info tracepoints' can now display 'installed on target'
328 or 'not installed on target' for each non-pending location of tracepoint.
329
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330* New configure options
331
332--enable-libmcheck/--disable-libmcheck
333 By default, development versions are built with -lmcheck on hosts
334 that support it, in order to help track memory corruption issues.
335 Release versions, on the other hand, are built without -lmcheck
336 by default. The --enable-libmcheck/--disable-libmcheck configure
337 options allow the user to override that default.
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338--with-babeltrace/--with-babeltrace-include/--with-babeltrace-lib
339 This configure option allows the user to build GDB with
340 libbabeltrace using which GDB can read Common Trace Format data.
23a80689 341
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342* New commands (for set/show, see "New options" below)
343
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344catch signal
345 Catch signals. This is similar to "handle", but allows commands and
346 conditions to be attached.
347
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348maint info bfds
349 List the BFDs known to GDB.
350
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351python-interactive [command]
352pi [command]
353 Start a Python interactive prompt, or evaluate the optional command
354 and print the result of expressions.
355
356py [command]
357 "py" is a new alias for "python".
358
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359enable type-printer [name]...
360disable type-printer [name]...
361 Enable or disable type printers.
362
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363* Removed commands
364
365 ** For the Renesas Super-H architecture, the "regs" command has been removed
366 (has been deprecated in GDB 7.5), and "info all-registers" should be used
367 instead.
368
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369* New options
370
371set print type methods (on|off)
372show print type methods
373 Control whether method declarations are displayed by "ptype".
374 The default is to show them.
375
376set print type typedefs (on|off)
377show print type typedefs
378 Control whether typedef definitions are displayed by "ptype".
379 The default is to show them.
380
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381set filename-display basename|relative|absolute
382show filename-display
383 Control the way in which filenames is displayed.
384 The default is "relative", which preserves previous behavior.
385
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386set trace-buffer-size
387show trace-buffer-size
388 Request target to change the size of trace buffer.
389
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390set remote trace-buffer-size-packet auto|on|off
391show remote trace-buffer-size-packet
392 Control the use of the remote protocol `QTBuffer:size' packet.
393
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394set debug aarch64
395show debug aarch64
396 Control display of debugging messages related to ARM AArch64.
397 The default is off.
398
399set debug coff-pe-read
400show debug coff-pe-read
401 Control display of debugging messages related to reading of COFF/PE
402 exported symbols.
403
404set debug mach-o
405show debug mach-o
406 Control display of debugging messages related to Mach-O symbols
407 processing.
408
409set debug notification
410show debug notification
411 Control display of debugging info for async remote notification.
412
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413* MI changes
414
415 ** Command parameter changes are now notified using new async record
416 "=cmd-param-changed".
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417 ** Trace frame changes caused by command "tfind" are now notified using
418 new async record "=traceframe-changed".
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419 ** The creation, deletion and modification of trace state variables
420 are now notified using new async records "=tsv-created",
421 "=tsv-deleted" and "=tsv-modified".
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422 ** The start and stop of process record are now notified using new
423 async record "=record-started" and "=record-stopped".
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424 ** Memory changes are now notified using new async record
425 "=memory-changed".
ed8a1c2d 426 ** The data-disassemble command response will include a "fullname" field
ec83d211 427 containing the absolute file name when source has been requested.
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428 ** New optional parameter COUNT added to the "-data-write-memory-bytes"
429 command, to allow pattern filling of memory areas.
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430 ** New commands "-catch-load"/"-catch-unload" added for intercepting
431 library load/unload events.
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432 ** The response to breakpoint commands and breakpoint async records
433 includes an "installed" field containing a boolean state about each
434 non-pending tracepoint location is whether installed on target or not.
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435 ** Output of the "-trace-status" command includes a "trace-file" field
436 containing the name of the trace file being examined. This field is
437 optional, and only present when examining a trace file.
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438 ** The "fullname" field is now always present along with the "file" field,
439 even if the file cannot be found by GDB.
5b9afe8a 440
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441* GDB now supports the "mini debuginfo" section, .gnu_debugdata.
442 You must have the LZMA library available when configuring GDB for this
443 feature to be enabled. For more information, see:
444 http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/MiniDebugInfo
445
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446* New remote packets
447
448QTBuffer:size
449 Set the size of trace buffer. The remote stub reports support for this
450 packet to gdb's qSupported query.
451
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452Qbtrace:bts
453 Enable Branch Trace Store (BTS)-based branch tracing for the current
454 thread. The remote stub reports support for this packet to gdb's
455 qSupported query.
456
457Qbtrace:off
458 Disable branch tracing for the current thread. The remote stub reports
459 support for this packet to gdb's qSupported query.
460
461qXfer:btrace:read
462 Read the traced branches for the current thread. The remote stub
463 reports support for this packet to gdb's qSupported query.
464
80c8d323 465*** Changes in GDB 7.5
d6e00af6 466
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467* GDB now supports x32 ABI. Visit <http://sites.google.com/site/x32abi/>
468 for more x32 ABI info.
469
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470* GDB now supports access to MIPS DSP registers on Linux targets.
471
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472* GDB now supports debugging microMIPS binaries.
473
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474* The "info os" command on GNU/Linux can now display information on
475 several new classes of objects managed by the operating system:
476 "info os procgroups" lists process groups
477 "info os files" lists file descriptors
478 "info os sockets" lists internet-domain sockets
479 "info os shm" lists shared-memory regions
480 "info os semaphores" lists semaphores
481 "info os msg" lists message queues
482 "info os modules" lists loaded kernel modules
483
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484* GDB now has support for SDT (Static Defined Tracing) probes. Currently,
485 the only implemented backend is for SystemTap probes (<sys/sdt.h>). You
486 can set a breakpoint using the new "-probe, "-pstap" or "-probe-stap"
487 options and inspect the probe arguments using the new $_probe_arg family
488 of convenience variables. You can obtain more information about SystemTap
489 in <http://sourceware.org/systemtap/>.
490
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491* GDB now supports reversible debugging on ARM, it allows you to
492 debug basic ARM and THUMB instructions, and provides
493 record/replay support.
494
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495* The option "symbol-reloading" has been deleted as it is no longer used.
496
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497* Python scripting
498
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499 ** GDB commands implemented in Python can now be put in command class
500 "gdb.COMMAND_USER".
501
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502 ** The "maint set python print-stack on|off" is now deleted.
503
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504 ** A new class, gdb.printing.FlagEnumerationPrinter, can be used to
505 apply "flag enum"-style pretty-printing to any enum.
506
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507 ** gdb.lookup_symbol can now work when there is no current frame.
508
509 ** gdb.Symbol now has a 'line' attribute, holding the line number in
510 the source at which the symbol was defined.
511
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512 ** gdb.Symbol now has the new attribute 'needs_frame' and the new
513 method 'value'. The former indicates whether the symbol needs a
514 frame in order to compute its value, and the latter computes the
515 symbol's value.
516
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517 ** A new method 'referenced_value' on gdb.Value objects which can
518 dereference pointer as well as C++ reference values.
519
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520 ** New methods 'global_block' and 'static_block' on gdb.Symtab objects
521 which return the global and static blocks (as gdb.Block objects),
522 of the underlying symbol table, respectively.
523
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524 ** New function gdb.find_pc_line which returns the gdb.Symtab_and_line
525 object associated with a PC value.
526
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527 ** gdb.Symtab_and_line has new attribute 'last' which holds the end
528 of the address range occupied by code for the current source line.
529
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530* Go language support.
531 GDB now supports debugging programs written in the Go programming
532 language.
533
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534* GDBserver now supports stdio connections.
535 E.g. (gdb) target remote | ssh myhost gdbserver - hello
536
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537* The binary "gdbtui" can no longer be built or installed.
538 Use "gdb -tui" instead.
539
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540* GDB will now print "flag" enums specially. A flag enum is one where
541 all the enumerator values have no bits in common when pairwise
542 "and"ed. When printing a value whose type is a flag enum, GDB will
543 show all the constants, e.g., for enum E { ONE = 1, TWO = 2}:
544 (gdb) print (enum E) 3
545 $1 = (ONE | TWO)
546
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547* The filename part of a linespec will now match trailing components
548 of a source file name. For example, "break gcc/expr.c:1000" will
549 now set a breakpoint in build/gcc/expr.c, but not
550 build/libcpp/expr.c.
551
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552* The "info proc" and "generate-core-file" commands will now also
553 work on remote targets connected to GDBserver on Linux.
554
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555* The command "info catch" has been removed. It has been disabled
556 since December 2007.
557
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558* The "catch exception" and "catch assert" commands now accept
559 a condition at the end of the command, much like the "break"
560 command does. For instance:
561
562 (gdb) catch exception Constraint_Error if Barrier = True
563
564 Previously, it was possible to add a condition to such catchpoints,
565 but it had to be done as a second step, after the catchpoint had been
566 created, using the "condition" command.
567
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568* The "info static-tracepoint-marker" command will now also work on
569 native Linux targets with in-process agent.
570
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571* GDB can now set breakpoints on inlined functions.
572
573* The .gdb_index section has been updated to include symbols for
574 inlined functions. GDB will ignore older .gdb_index sections by
575 default, which could cause symbol files to be loaded more slowly
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576 until their .gdb_index sections can be recreated. The new command
577 "set use-deprecated-index-sections on" will cause GDB to use any older
578 .gdb_index sections it finds. This will restore performance, but the
579 ability to set breakpoints on inlined functions will be lost in symbol
580 files with older .gdb_index sections.
481860b3 581
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582 The .gdb_index section has also been updated to record more information
583 about each symbol. This speeds up the "info variables", "info functions"
584 and "info types" commands when used with programs having the .gdb_index
585 section, as well as speeding up debugging with shared libraries using
586 the .gdb_index section.
587
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588* Ada support for GDB/MI Variable Objects has been added.
589
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590* GDB can now support 'breakpoint always-inserted mode' in 'record'
591 target.
592
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SS
593* MI changes
594
595 ** New command -info-os is the MI equivalent of "info os".
596
37ce89eb
SS
597 ** Output logs ("set logging" and related) now include MI output.
598
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TT
599* New commands
600
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DE
601 ** "set use-deprecated-index-sections on|off"
602 "show use-deprecated-index-sections on|off"
603 Controls the use of deprecated .gdb_index sections.
604
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TT
605 ** "catch load" and "catch unload" can be used to stop when a shared
606 library is loaded or unloaded, respectively.
607
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SS
608 ** "enable count" can be used to auto-disable a breakpoint after
609 several hits.
610
57651221 611 ** "info vtbl" can be used to show the virtual method tables for
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TT
612 C++ and Java objects.
613
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614 ** "explore" and its sub commands "explore value" and "explore type"
615 can be used to reccursively explore values and types of
616 expressions. These commands are available only if GDB is
617 configured with '--with-python'.
618
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619 ** "info auto-load" shows status of all kinds of auto-loaded files,
620 "info auto-load gdb-scripts" shows status of auto-loading GDB canned
621 sequences of commands files, "info auto-load python-scripts"
622 shows status of auto-loading Python script files,
623 "info auto-load local-gdbinit" shows status of loading init file
624 (.gdbinit) from current directory and "info auto-load libthread-db" shows
625 status of inferior specific thread debugging shared library loading.
626
627 ** "info auto-load-scripts", "set auto-load-scripts on|off"
628 and "show auto-load-scripts" commands have been deprecated, use their
629 "info auto-load python-scripts", "set auto-load python-scripts on|off"
630 and "show auto-load python-scripts" counterparts instead.
631
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632 ** "dprintf location,format,args..." creates a dynamic printf, which
633 is basically a breakpoint that does a printf and immediately
634 resumes your program's execution, so it is like a printf that you
635 can insert dynamically at runtime instead of at compiletime.
636
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TT
637 ** "set print symbol"
638 "show print symbol"
639 Controls whether GDB attempts to display the symbol, if any,
640 corresponding to addresses it prints. This defaults to "on", but
641 you can set it to "off" to restore GDB's previous behavior.
642
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TS
643* Deprecated commands
644
645 ** For the Renesas Super-H architecture, the "regs" command has been
646 deprecated, and "info all-registers" should be used instead.
647
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648* New targets
649
650Renesas RL78 rl78-*-elf
60c9a3c0 651HP OpenVMS ia64 ia64-hp-openvms*
a58b110a 652
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653* GDBserver supports evaluation of breakpoint conditions. When
654 support is advertised by GDBserver, GDB may be told to send the
655 breakpoint conditions in bytecode form to GDBserver. GDBserver
656 will only report the breakpoint trigger to GDB when its condition
657 evaluates to true.
658
659* New options
660
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MR
661set mips compression
662show mips compression
663 Select the compressed ISA encoding used in functions that have no symbol
664 information available. The encoding can be set to either of:
665 mips16
666 micromips
667 and is updated automatically from ELF file flags if available.
668
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669set breakpoint condition-evaluation
670show breakpoint condition-evaluation
cf65ecd3 671 Control whether breakpoint conditions are evaluated by GDB ("host") or by
5b43fab2
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672 GDBserver ("target"). Default option "auto" chooses the most efficient
673 available mode.
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674 This option can improve debugger efficiency depending on the speed of the
675 target.
676
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677set auto-load off
678 Disable auto-loading globally.
679
680show auto-load
681 Show auto-loading setting of all kinds of auto-loaded files.
682
683set auto-load gdb-scripts on|off
684show auto-load gdb-scripts
685 Control auto-loading of GDB canned sequences of commands files.
686
687set auto-load python-scripts on|off
688show auto-load python-scripts
689 Control auto-loading of Python script files.
690
691set auto-load local-gdbinit on|off
692show auto-load local-gdbinit
693 Control loading of init file (.gdbinit) from current directory.
694
695set auto-load libthread-db on|off
696show auto-load libthread-db
697 Control auto-loading of inferior specific thread debugging shared library.
698
7349ff92 699set auto-load scripts-directory <dir1>[:<dir2>...]
9cc815f5 700show auto-load scripts-directory
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701 Set a list of directories from which to load auto-loaded scripts.
702 Automatically loaded Python scripts and GDB scripts are located in one
703 of the directories listed by this option.
704 The delimiter (':' above) may differ according to the host platform.
705
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706set auto-load safe-path <dir1>[:<dir2>...]
707show auto-load safe-path
708 Set a list of directories from which it is safe to auto-load files.
709 The delimiter (':' above) may differ according to the host platform.
710
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JK
711set debug auto-load on|off
712show debug auto-load
713 Control display of debugging info for auto-loading the files above.
714
d3ce09f5 715set dprintf-style gdb|call|agent
e7e0cddf 716show dprintf-style
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SS
717 Control the way in which a dynamic printf is performed; "gdb"
718 requests a GDB printf command, while "call" causes dprintf to call a
719 function in the inferior. "agent" requests that the target agent
720 (such as GDBserver) do the printing.
e7e0cddf
SS
721
722set dprintf-function <expr>
723show dprintf-function
724set dprintf-channel <expr>
725show dprintf-channel
726 Set the function and optional first argument to the call when using
727 the "call" style of dynamic printf.
728
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SS
729set disconnected-dprintf on|off
730show disconnected-dprintf
731 Control whether agent-style dynamic printfs continue to be in effect
732 after GDB disconnects.
733
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JK
734* New configure options
735
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JK
736--with-auto-load-dir
737 Configure default value for the 'set auto-load scripts-directory'
1564a261
JK
738 setting above. It defaults to '$debugdir:$datadir/auto-load',
739 $debugdir representing global debugging info directories (available
740 via 'show debug-file-directory') and $datadir representing GDB's data
741 directory (available via 'show data-directory').
7349ff92 742
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JK
743--with-auto-load-safe-path
744 Configure default value for the 'set auto-load safe-path' setting
7349ff92 745 above. It defaults to the --with-auto-load-dir setting.
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JK
746
747--without-auto-load-safe-path
748 Set 'set auto-load safe-path' to '/', effectively disabling this
749 security feature.
750
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LM
751* New remote packets
752
74c48cbb
PA
753z0/z1 conditional breakpoints extension
754
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LM
755 The z0/z1 breakpoint insertion packets have been extended to carry
756 a list of conditional expressions over to the remote stub depending on the
757 condition evaluation mode. The use of this extension can be controlled
758 via the "set remote conditional-breakpoints-packet" command.
759
9b224c5e
PA
760QProgramSignals:
761
762 Specify the signals which the remote stub may pass to the debugged
763 program without GDB involvement.
764
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JK
765* New command line options
766
767--init-command=FILE, -ix Like --command, -x but execute it
768 before loading inferior.
769--init-eval-command=COMMAND, -iex Like --eval-command=COMMAND, -ex but
770 execute it before loading inferior.
771
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JB
772*** Changes in GDB 7.4
773
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TT
774* GDB now handles ambiguous linespecs more consistently; the existing
775 FILE:LINE support has been expanded to other types of linespecs. A
776 breakpoint will now be set on all matching locations in all
777 inferiors, and locations will be added or removed according to
778 inferior changes.
779
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JL
780* GDB now allows you to skip uninteresting functions and files when
781 stepping with the "skip function" and "skip file" commands.
782
480a3f21
PW
783* GDB has two new commands: "set remote hardware-watchpoint-length-limit"
784 and "show remote hardware-watchpoint-length-limit". These allows to
785 set or show the maximum length limit (in bytes) of a remote
786 target hardware watchpoint.
787
788 This allows e.g. to use "unlimited" hardware watchpoints with the
789 gdbserver integrated in Valgrind version >= 3.7.0. Such Valgrind
790 watchpoints are slower than real hardware watchpoints but are
791 significantly faster than gdb software watchpoints.
792
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PM
793* Python scripting
794
32d1c362 795 ** The register_pretty_printer function in module gdb.printing now takes
7d0aff21 796 an optional `replace' argument. If True, the new printer replaces any
32d1c362
DE
797 existing one.
798
3a7bf607 799 ** The "maint set python print-stack on|off" command has been
4795f398
DE
800 deprecated and will be deleted in GDB 7.5.
801 A new command: "set python print-stack none|full|message" has
802 replaced it. Additionally, the default for "print-stack" is
803 now "message", which just prints the error message without
804 the stack trace.
3a7bf607 805
baacfb07 806 ** A prompt substitution hook (prompt_hook) is now available to the
3a7bf607 807 Python API.
713389e0 808
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809 ** A new Python module, gdb.prompt has been added to the GDB Python
810 modules library. This module provides functionality for
baacfb07 811 escape sequences in prompts (used by set/show
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812 extended-prompt). These escape sequences are replaced by their
813 corresponding value.
814
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PM
815 ** Python commands and convenience-functions located in
816 'data-directory'/python/gdb/command and
817 'data-directory'/python/gdb/function are now automatically loaded
818 on GDB start-up.
819
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PM
820 ** Blocks now provide four new attributes. global_block and
821 static_block will return the global and static blocks
822 respectively. is_static and is_global are boolean attributes
823 that indicate if the block is one of those two types.
824
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DE
825 ** Symbols now provide the "type" attribute, the type of the symbol.
826
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KP
827 ** The "gdb.breakpoint" function has been deprecated in favor of
828 "gdb.breakpoints".
829
cc72b2a2
KP
830 ** A new class "gdb.FinishBreakpoint" is provided to catch the return
831 of a function. This class is based on the "finish" command
832 available in the CLI.
833
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PK
834 ** Type objects for struct and union types now allow access to
835 the fields using standard Python dictionary (mapping) methods.
836 For example, "some_type['myfield']" now works, as does
837 "some_type.items()".
838
20c168b5
KP
839 ** A new event "gdb.new_objfile" has been added, triggered by loading a
840 new object file.
841
03c3051a
PK
842 ** A new function, "deep_items" has been added to the gdb.types
843 module in the GDB Python modules library. This function returns
844 an iterator over the fields of a struct or union type. Unlike
845 the standard Python "iteritems" method, it will recursively traverse
846 any anonymous fields.
847
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TT
848* MI changes
849
850 ** "*stopped" events can report several new "reason"s, such as
851 "solib-event".
852
853 ** Breakpoint changes are now notified using new async records, like
854 "=breakpoint-modified".
855
856 ** New command -ada-task-info.
857
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DE
858* libthread-db-search-path now supports two special values: $sdir and $pdir.
859 $sdir specifies the default system locations of shared libraries.
860 $pdir specifies the directory where the libpthread used by the application
861 lives.
862
863 GDB no longer looks in $sdir and $pdir after it has searched the directories
864 mentioned in libthread-db-search-path. If you want to search those
865 directories, they must be specified in libthread-db-search-path.
866 The default value of libthread-db-search-path on GNU/Linux and Solaris
867 systems is now "$sdir:$pdir".
868
869 $pdir is not supported by gdbserver, it is currently ignored.
870 $sdir is supported by gdbserver.
871
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DE
872* New configure option --with-iconv-bin.
873 When using the internationalization support like the one in the GNU C
874 library, GDB will invoke the "iconv" program to get a list of supported
875 character sets. If this program lives in a non-standard location, one can
876 use this option to specify where to find it.
877
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TJB
878* When natively debugging programs on PowerPC BookE processors running
879 a Linux kernel version 2.6.34 or later, GDB supports masked hardware
880 watchpoints, which specify a mask in addition to an address to watch.
881 The mask specifies that some bits of an address (the bits which are
882 reset in the mask) should be ignored when matching the address accessed
883 by the inferior against the watchpoint address. See the "PowerPC Embedded"
884 section in the user manual for more details.
885
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JK
886* The new option --once causes GDBserver to stop listening for connections once
887 the first connection is made. The listening port used by GDBserver will
888 become available after that.
889
71eba9c2 890* New commands "info macros" and "alias" have been added.
edc84990 891
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JK
892* New function parameters suffix @entry specifies value of function parameter
893 at the time the function got called. Entry values are available only since
894 gcc version 4.7.
895
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DE
896* New commands
897
898!SHELL COMMAND
899 "!" is now an alias of the "shell" command.
900 Note that no space is needed between "!" and SHELL COMMAND.
901
9c06b0b4
TJB
902* Changed commands
903
904watch EXPRESSION mask MASK_VALUE
905 The watch command now supports the mask argument which allows creation
906 of masked watchpoints, if the current architecture supports this feature.
907
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DE
908info auto-load-scripts [REGEXP]
909 This command was formerly named "maintenance print section-scripts".
910 It is now generally useful and is no longer a maintenance-only command.
911
71eba9c2 912info macro [-all] [--] MACRO
913 The info macro command has new options `-all' and `--'. The first for
914 printing all definitions of a macro. The second for explicitly specifying
915 the end of arguments and the beginning of the macro name in case the macro
916 name starts with a hyphen.
917
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SS
918collect[/s] EXPRESSIONS
919 The tracepoint collect command now takes an optional modifier "/s"
920 that directs it to dereference pointer-to-character types and
921 collect the bytes of memory up to a zero byte. The behavior is
922 similar to what you see when you use the regular print command on a
923 string. An optional integer following the "/s" sets a bound on the
924 number of bytes that will be collected.
925
f196051f
SS
926tstart [NOTES]
927 The trace start command now interprets any supplied arguments as a
928 note to be recorded with the trace run, with an effect similar to
929 setting the variable trace-notes.
930
931tstop [NOTES]
932 The trace stop command now interprets any arguments as a note to be
933 mentioned along with the tstatus report that the trace was stopped
934 with a command. The effect is similar to setting the variable
935 trace-stop-notes.
936
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KY
937* Tracepoints can now be enabled and disabled at any time after a trace
938 experiment has been started using the standard "enable" and "disable"
939 commands. It is now possible to start a trace experiment with no enabled
940 tracepoints; GDB will display a warning, but will allow the experiment to
941 begin, assuming that tracepoints will be enabled as needed while the trace
942 is running.
943
405f8e94
SS
944* Fast tracepoints on 32-bit x86-architectures can now be placed at
945 locations with 4-byte instructions, when they were previously
946 limited to locations with instructions of 5 bytes or longer.
947
2bda9cc5
JK
948* New options
949
45cfd468
DE
950set debug dwarf2-read
951show debug dwarf2-read
952 Turns on or off display of debugging messages related to reading
953 DWARF debug info. The default is off.
954
955set debug symtab-create
956show debug symtab-create
957 Turns on or off display of debugging messages related to symbol table
958 creation. The default is off.
959
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PM
960set extended-prompt
961show extended-prompt
962 Set the GDB prompt, and allow escape sequences to be inserted to
963 display miscellaneous information (see 'help set extended-prompt'
964 for the list of sequences). This prompt (and any information
965 accessed through the escape sequences) is updated every time the
966 prompt is displayed.
967
2bda9cc5
JK
968set print entry-values (both|compact|default|if-needed|no|only|preferred)
969show print entry-values
970 Set printing of frame argument values at function entry. In some cases
971 GDB can determine the value of function argument which was passed by the
972 function caller, even if the value was modified inside the called function.
973
974set debug entry-values
975show debug entry-values
976 Control display of debugging info for determining frame argument values at
977 function entry and virtual tail call frames.
978
c011a4f4
DE
979set basenames-may-differ
980show basenames-may-differ
981 Set whether a source file may have multiple base names.
982 (A "base name" is the name of a file with the directory part removed.
983 Example: The base name of "/home/user/hello.c" is "hello.c".)
984 If set, GDB will canonicalize file names (e.g., expand symlinks)
985 before comparing them. Canonicalization is an expensive operation,
986 but it allows the same file be known by more than one base name.
987 If not set (the default), all source files are assumed to have just
988 one base name, and gdb will do file name comparisons more efficiently.
989
f196051f
SS
990set trace-user
991show trace-user
992set trace-notes
993show trace-notes
994 Set a user name and notes for the current and any future trace runs.
995 This is useful for long-running and/or disconnected traces, to
996 inform others (or yourself) as to who is running the trace, supply
997 contact information, or otherwise explain what is going on.
998
999set trace-stop-notes
1000show trace-stop-notes
1001 Set a note attached to the trace run, that is displayed when the
1002 trace has been stopped by a tstop command. This is useful for
1003 instance as an explanation, if you are stopping a trace run that was
1004 started by someone else.
1005
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KY
1006* New remote packets
1007
1008QTEnable
1009
1010 Dynamically enable a tracepoint in a started trace experiment.
1011
1012QTDisable
1013
1014 Dynamically disable a tracepoint in a started trace experiment.
1015
f196051f
SS
1016QTNotes
1017
1018 Set the user and notes of the trace run.
1019
1020qTP
1021
1022 Query the current status of a tracepoint.
1023
405f8e94
SS
1024qTMinFTPILen
1025
1026 Query the minimum length of instruction at which a fast tracepoint may
1027 be placed.
1028
1a532630
PP
1029* Dcache size (number of lines) and line-size are now runtime-configurable
1030 via "set dcache line" and "set dcache line-size" commands.
1031
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YQ
1032* New targets
1033
1034Texas Instruments TMS320C6x tic6x-*-*
1035
87326c78
DD
1036* New Simulators
1037
1038Renesas RL78 rl78-*-elf
1039
e8d56f18
JB
1040*** Changes in GDB 7.3.1
1041
1042* The build failure for NetBSD and OpenBSD targets have now been fixed.
1043
d6e00af6 1044*** Changes in GDB 7.3
797054e6 1045
60f98dde
MS
1046* GDB has a new command: "thread find [REGEXP]".
1047 It finds the thread id whose name, target id, or thread extra info
1048 matches the given regular expression.
1049
eee5b35e
DD
1050* The "catch syscall" command now works on mips*-linux* targets.
1051
b716877b
AB
1052* The -data-disassemble MI command now supports modes 2 and 3 for
1053 dumping the instruction opcodes.
1054
aae1c79a
DE
1055* New command line options
1056
1057-data-directory DIR Specify DIR as the "data-directory".
1058 This is mostly for testing purposes.
1059
a86caf66
DE
1060* The "maint set python auto-load on|off" command has been renamed to
1061 "set auto-load-scripts on|off".
1062
99e7ae30
DE
1063* GDB has a new command: "set directories".
1064 It is like the "dir" command except that it replaces the
1065 source path list instead of augmenting it.
1066
4694da01
TT
1067* GDB now understands thread names.
1068
1069 On GNU/Linux, "info threads" will display the thread name as set by
1070 prctl or pthread_setname_np.
1071
1072 There is also a new command, "thread name", which can be used to
1073 assign a name internally for GDB to display.
1074
f4b8a18d
KW
1075* OpenCL C
1076 Initial support for the OpenCL C language (http://www.khronos.org/opencl)
1077 has been integrated into GDB.
1078
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PM
1079* Python scripting
1080
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PM
1081 ** The function gdb.Write now accepts an optional keyword 'stream'.
1082 This keyword, when provided, will direct the output to either
1083 stdout, stderr, or GDB's logging output.
1084
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PM
1085 ** Parameters can now be be sub-classed in Python, and in particular
1086 you may implement the get_set_doc and get_show_doc functions.
1087 This improves how Parameter set/show documentation is processed
1088 and allows for more dynamic content.
1089
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PM
1090 ** Symbols, Symbol Table, Symbol Table and Line, Object Files,
1091 Inferior, Inferior Thread, Blocks, and Block Iterator APIs now
1092 have an is_valid method.
1093
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PM
1094 ** Breakpoints can now be sub-classed in Python, and in particular
1095 you may implement a 'stop' function that is executed each time
1096 the inferior reaches that breakpoint.
1097
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DE
1098 ** New function gdb.lookup_global_symbol looks up a global symbol.
1099
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PM
1100 ** GDB values in Python are now callable if the value represents a
1101 function. For example, if 'some_value' represents a function that
1102 takes two integer parameters and returns a value, you can call
1103 that function like so:
1104
1105 result = some_value (10,20)
1106
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DE
1107 ** Module gdb.types has been added.
1108 It contains a collection of utilities for working with gdb.Types objects:
1109 get_basic_type, has_field, make_enum_dict.
1110
7b51bc51
DE
1111 ** Module gdb.printing has been added.
1112 It contains utilities for writing and registering pretty-printers.
1113 New classes: PrettyPrinter, SubPrettyPrinter,
1114 RegexpCollectionPrettyPrinter.
1115 New function: register_pretty_printer.
1116
1117 ** New commands "info pretty-printers", "enable pretty-printer" and
1118 "disable pretty-printer" have been added.
1119
99e7ae30
DE
1120 ** gdb.parameter("directories") is now available.
1121
d8e22779
TT
1122 ** New function gdb.newest_frame returns the newest frame in the
1123 selected thread.
1124
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TT
1125 ** The gdb.InferiorThread class has a new "name" attribute. This
1126 holds the thread's name.
1127
505500db
SW
1128 ** Python Support for Inferior events.
1129 Python scripts can add observers to be notified of events
824446ad 1130 occurring in the process being debugged.
c17a9e46
HZ
1131 The following events are currently supported:
1132 - gdb.events.cont Continue event.
1133 - gdb.events.exited Inferior exited event.
1134 - gdb.events.stop Signal received, and Breakpoint hit events.
1135
def98928
TT
1136* C++ Improvements:
1137
1138 ** GDB now puts template parameters in scope when debugging in an
1139 instantiation. For example, if you have:
1140
1141 template<int X> int func (void) { return X; }
1142
1143 then if you step into func<5>, "print X" will show "5". This
1144 feature requires proper debuginfo support from the compiler; it
1145 was added to GCC 4.5.
1146
66cb8159
TT
1147 ** The motion commands "next", "finish", "until", and "advance" now
1148 work better when exceptions are thrown. In particular, GDB will
1149 no longer lose control of the inferior; instead, the GDB will
1150 stop the inferior at the point at which the exception is caught.
1151 This functionality requires a change in the exception handling
1152 code that was introduced in GCC 4.5.
1153
4aac0db7
UW
1154* GDB now follows GCC's rules on accessing volatile objects when
1155 reading or writing target state during expression evaluation.
1156 One notable difference to prior behavior is that "print x = 0"
1157 no longer generates a read of x; the value of the assignment is
1158 now always taken directly from the value being assigned.
1159
283e6a52
TT
1160* GDB now has some support for using labels in the program's source in
1161 linespecs. For instance, you can use "advance label" to continue
1162 execution to a label.
1163
1164* GDB now has support for reading and writing a new .gdb_index
1165 section. This section holds a fast index of DWARF debugging
1166 information and can be used to greatly speed up GDB startup and
1167 operation. See the documentation for `save gdb-index' for details.
1168
b56df873 1169* The "watch" command now accepts an optional "-location" argument.
14c0d4e1 1170 When used, this causes GDB to watch the memory referred to by the
b56df873
TT
1171 expression. Such a watchpoint is never deleted due to it going out
1172 of scope.
1173
ae53ffa4
PA
1174* GDB now supports thread debugging of core dumps on GNU/Linux.
1175
1176 GDB now activates thread debugging using the libthread_db library
1177 when debugging GNU/Linux core dumps, similarly to when debugging
1178 live processes. As a result, when debugging a core dump file, GDB
1179 is now able to display pthread_t ids of threads. For example, "info
1180 threads" shows the same output as when debugging the process when it
1181 was live. In earlier releases, you'd see something like this:
1182
1183 (gdb) info threads
1184 * 1 LWP 6780 main () at main.c:10
1185
1186 While now you see this:
1187
1188 (gdb) info threads
1189 * 1 Thread 0x7f0f5712a700 (LWP 6780) main () at main.c:10
1190
1191 It is also now possible to inspect TLS variables when debugging core
1192 dumps.
1193
1194 When debugging a core dump generated on a machine other than the one
1195 used to run GDB, you may need to point GDB at the correct
1196 libthread_db library with the "set libthread-db-search-path"
1197 command. See the user manual for more details on this command.
1198
f1310107
TJB
1199* When natively debugging programs on PowerPC BookE processors running
1200 a Linux kernel version 2.6.34 or later, GDB supports ranged breakpoints,
1201 which stop execution of the inferior whenever it executes an instruction
1202 at any address within the specified range. See the "PowerPC Embedded"
1203 section in the user manual for more details.
1204
248c9dbc
JB
1205* New features in the GDB remote stub, GDBserver
1206
1aee7009
JB
1207 ** GDBserver is now supported on PowerPC LynxOS (versions 4.x and 5.x),
1208 and i686 LynxOS (version 5.x).
248c9dbc 1209
eb826dc6
MF
1210 ** GDBserver is now supported on Blackfin Linux.
1211
44603653
JB
1212* New native configurations
1213
1214ia64 HP-UX ia64-*-hpux*
1215
91021223
MF
1216* New targets:
1217
1218Analog Devices, Inc. Blackfin Processor bfin-*
1219
6e1bb179
JB
1220* Ada task switching is now supported on sparc-elf targets when
1221 debugging a program using the Ravenscar Profile. For more information,
1222 see the "Tasking Support when using the Ravenscar Profile" section
1223 in the GDB user manual.
1224
50c97f38
TT
1225* Guile support was removed.
1226
448a92bf
MF
1227* New features in the GNU simulator
1228
1229 ** The --map-info flag lists all known core mappings.
1230
66ee2731
MF
1231 ** CFI flashes may be simulated via the "cfi" device.
1232
76b8507d 1233*** Changes in GDB 7.2
bfbf3774 1234
ba25b921
PA
1235* Shared library support for remote targets by default
1236
1237 When GDB is configured for a generic, non-OS specific target, like
1238 for example, --target=arm-eabi or one of the many *-*-elf targets,
1239 GDB now queries remote stubs for loaded shared libraries using the
1240 `qXfer:libraries:read' packet. Previously, shared library support
1241 was always disabled for such configurations.
1242
4656f5c6
SW
1243* C++ Improvements:
1244
1245 ** Argument Dependent Lookup (ADL)
1246
1247 In C++ ADL lookup directs function search to the namespaces of its
1248 arguments even if the namespace has not been imported.
1249 For example:
1250 namespace A
1251 {
1252 class B { };
1253 void foo (B) { }
1254 }
1255 ...
1256 A::B b
1257 foo(b)
1258 Here the compiler will search for `foo' in the namespace of 'b'
1259 and find A::foo. GDB now supports this. This construct is commonly
1260 used in the Standard Template Library for operators.
1261
1262 ** Improved User Defined Operator Support
1263
1264 In addition to member operators, GDB now supports lookup of operators
1265 defined in a namespace and imported with a `using' directive, operators
1266 defined in the global scope, operators imported implicitly from an
1267 anonymous namespace, and the ADL operators mentioned in the previous
1268 entry.
1269 GDB now also supports proper overload resolution for all the previously
1270 mentioned flavors of operators.
1271
254e6b9e
DE
1272 ** static const class members
1273
1274 Printing of static const class members that are initialized in the
1275 class definition has been fixed.
1276
711e434b
PM
1277* Windows Thread Information Block access.
1278
1279 On Windows targets, GDB now supports displaying the Windows Thread
1280 Information Block (TIB) structure. This structure is visible either
1281 by using the new command `info w32 thread-information-block' or, by
1282 dereferencing the new convenience variable named `$_tlb', a
1283 thread-specific pointer to the TIB. This feature is also supported
1284 when remote debugging using GDBserver.
1285
0fb4aa4b
PA
1286* Static tracepoints
1287
1288 Static tracepoints are calls in the user program into a tracing
1289 library. One such library is a port of the LTTng kernel tracer to
1290 userspace --- UST (LTTng Userspace Tracer, http://lttng.org/ust).
1291 When debugging with GDBserver, GDB now supports combining the GDB
1292 tracepoint machinery with such libraries. For example: the user can
1293 use GDB to probe a static tracepoint marker (a call from the user
1294 program into the tracing library) with the new "strace" command (see
1295 "New commands" below). This creates a "static tracepoint" in the
1296 breakpoint list, that can be manipulated with the same feature set
1297 as fast and regular tracepoints. E.g., collect registers, local and
1298 global variables, collect trace state variables, and define
1299 tracepoint conditions. In addition, the user can collect extra
1300 static tracepoint marker specific data, by collecting the new
1301 $_sdata internal variable. When analyzing the trace buffer, you can
1302 inspect $_sdata like any other variable available to GDB. For more
1303 information, see the "Tracepoints" chapter in GDB user manual. New
1304 remote packets have been defined to support static tracepoints, see
1305 the "New remote packets" section below.
1306
ca11e899
SS
1307* Better reconstruction of tracepoints after disconnected tracing
1308
1309 GDB will attempt to download the original source form of tracepoint
1310 definitions when starting a trace run, and then will upload these
1311 upon reconnection to the target, resulting in a more accurate
1312 reconstruction of the tracepoints that are in use on the target.
1313
1314* Observer mode
1315
1316 You can now exercise direct control over the ways that GDB can
1317 affect your program. For instance, you can disallow the setting of
1318 breakpoints, so that the program can run continuously (assuming
1319 non-stop mode). In addition, the "observer" variable is available
1320 to switch all of the different controls; in observer mode, GDB
1321 cannot affect the target's behavior at all, which is useful for
1322 tasks like diagnosing live systems in the field.
1323
1324* The new convenience variable $_thread holds the number of the
1325 current thread.
1326
711e434b
PM
1327* New remote packets
1328
1329qGetTIBAddr
1330
1331 Return the address of the Windows Thread Information Block of a given thread.
1332
dde08ee1
PA
1333qRelocInsn
1334
1335 In response to several of the tracepoint packets, the target may now
1336 also respond with a number of intermediate `qRelocInsn' request
1337 packets before the final result packet, to have GDB handle
1338 relocating an instruction to execute at a different address. This
1339 is particularly useful for stubs that support fast tracepoints. GDB
1340 reports support for this feature in the qSupported packet.
1341
0fb4aa4b
PA
1342qTfSTM, qTsSTM
1343
1344 List static tracepoint markers in the target program.
1345
1346qTSTMat
1347
1348 List static tracepoint markers at a given address in the target
1349 program.
1350
1351qXfer:statictrace:read
1352
1353 Read the static trace data collected (by a `collect $_sdata'
1354 tracepoint action). The remote stub reports support for this packet
1355 to gdb's qSupported query.
1356
ca11e899
SS
1357QAllow
1358
1359 Send the current settings of GDB's permission flags.
1360
1361QTDPsrc
1362
1363 Send part of the source (textual) form of a tracepoint definition,
1364 which includes location, conditional, and action list.
1365
3f7b2faa
DE
1366* The source command now accepts a -s option to force searching for the
1367 script in the source search path even if the script name specifies
1368 a directory.
1369
d337e9f0
PA
1370* New features in the GDB remote stub, GDBserver
1371
0fb4aa4b
PA
1372 - GDBserver now support tracepoints (including fast tracepoints, and
1373 static tracepoints). The feature is currently supported by the
1374 i386-linux and amd64-linux builds. See the "Tracepoints support
1375 in gdbserver" section in the manual for more information.
1376
1377 GDBserver JIT compiles the tracepoint's conditional agent
1378 expression bytecode into native code whenever possible for low
1379 overhead dynamic tracepoints conditionals. For such tracepoints,
1380 an expression that examines program state is evaluated when the
1381 tracepoint is reached, in order to determine whether to capture
1382 trace data. If the condition is simple and false, processing the
1383 tracepoint finishes very quickly and no data is gathered.
1384
1385 GDBserver interfaces with the UST (LTTng Userspace Tracer) library
1386 for static tracepoints support.
d337e9f0 1387
c24d0242
PM
1388 - GDBserver now supports x86_64 Windows 64-bit debugging.
1389
c8d5aac9
L
1390* GDB now sends xmlRegisters= in qSupported packet to indicate that
1391 it understands register description.
1392
7c953934
TT
1393* The --batch flag now disables pagination and queries.
1394
8685c86f
L
1395* X86 general purpose registers
1396
1397 GDB now supports reading/writing byte, word and double-word x86
1398 general purpose registers directly. This means you can use, say,
1399 $ah or $ax to refer, respectively, to the byte register AH and
1400 16-bit word register AX that are actually portions of the 32-bit
1401 register EAX or 64-bit register RAX.
1402
95a42b64 1403* The `commands' command now accepts a range of breakpoints to modify.
86b17b60
PA
1404 A plain `commands' following a command that creates multiple
1405 breakpoints affects all the breakpoints set by that command. This
1406 applies to breakpoints set by `rbreak', and also applies when a
1407 single `break' command creates multiple breakpoints (e.g.,
1408 breakpoints on overloaded c++ functions).
95a42b64 1409
8bd10a10
CM
1410* The `rbreak' command now accepts a filename specification as part of
1411 its argument, limiting the functions selected by the regex to those
1412 in the specified file.
1413
ab38a727
PA
1414* Support for remote debugging Windows and SymbianOS shared libraries
1415 from Unix hosts has been improved. Non Windows GDB builds now can
1416 understand target reported file names that follow MS-DOS based file
1417 system semantics, such as file names that include drive letters and
1418 use the backslash character as directory separator. This makes it
1419 possible to transparently use the "set sysroot" and "set
1420 solib-search-path" on Unix hosts to point as host copies of the
1421 target's shared libraries. See the new command "set
1422 target-file-system-kind" described below, and the "Commands to
1423 specify files" section in the user manual for more information.
1424
6149aea9
PA
1425* New commands
1426
f1421989
HZ
1427eval template, expressions...
1428 Convert the values of one or more expressions under the control
1429 of the string template to a command line, and call it.
1430
ab38a727
PA
1431set target-file-system-kind unix|dos-based|auto
1432show target-file-system-kind
1433 Set or show the assumed file system kind for target reported file
1434 names.
1435
6149aea9
PA
1436save breakpoints <filename>
1437 Save all current breakpoint definitions to a file suitable for use
1438 in a later debugging session. To read the saved breakpoint
1439 definitions, use the `source' command.
1440
1441`save tracepoints' is a new alias for `save-tracepoints'. The latter
1442is now deprecated.
1443
0fb4aa4b
PA
1444info static-tracepoint-markers
1445 Display information about static tracepoint markers in the target.
1446
1447strace FN | FILE:LINE | *ADDR | -m MARKER_ID
1448 Define a static tracepoint by probing a marker at the given
1449 function, line, address, or marker ID.
1450
ca11e899
SS
1451set observer on|off
1452show observer
1453 Enable and disable observer mode.
1454
1455set may-write-registers on|off
1456set may-write-memory on|off
1457set may-insert-breakpoints on|off
1458set may-insert-tracepoints on|off
1459set may-insert-fast-tracepoints on|off
1460set may-interrupt on|off
1461 Set individual permissions for GDB effects on the target. Note that
1462 some of these settings can have undesirable or surprising
1463 consequences, particularly when changed in the middle of a session.
1464 For instance, disabling the writing of memory can prevent
1465 breakpoints from being inserted, cause single-stepping to fail, or
1466 even crash your program, if you disable after breakpoints have been
1467 inserted. However, GDB should not crash.
1468
1469set record memory-query on|off
1470show record memory-query
1471 Control whether to stop the inferior if memory changes caused
1472 by an instruction cannot be recorded.
1473
53a71c06
CR
1474* Changed commands
1475
1476disassemble
1477 The disassemble command now supports "start,+length" form of two arguments.
1478
f3e9a817
PM
1479* Python scripting
1480
9279c692
JB
1481** GDB now provides a new directory location, called the python directory,
1482 where Python scripts written for GDB can be installed. The location
1483 of that directory is <data-directory>/python, where <data-directory>
1484 is the GDB data directory. For more details, see section `Scripting
1485 GDB using Python' in the manual.
1486
adc36818 1487** The GDB Python API now has access to breakpoints, symbols, symbol
595939de
PM
1488 tables, program spaces, inferiors, threads and frame's code blocks.
1489 Additionally, GDB Parameters can now be created from the API, and
1490 manipulated via set/show in the CLI.
f870a310 1491
fa33c3cd 1492** New functions gdb.target_charset, gdb.target_wide_charset,
07ca107c
DE
1493 gdb.progspaces, gdb.current_progspace, and gdb.string_to_argv.
1494
1495** New exception gdb.GdbError.
fa33c3cd
DE
1496
1497** Pretty-printers are now also looked up in the current program space.
f3e9a817 1498
967cf477
DE
1499** Pretty-printers can now be individually enabled and disabled.
1500
8a1ea21f
DE
1501** GDB now looks for names of Python scripts to auto-load in a
1502 special section named `.debug_gdb_scripts', in addition to looking
1503 for a OBJFILE-gdb.py script when OBJFILE is read by the debugger.
1504
a7bdde9e
VP
1505* Tracepoint actions were unified with breakpoint commands. In particular,
1506there are no longer differences in "info break" output for breakpoints and
1507tracepoints and the "commands" command can be used for both tracepoints and
1508regular breakpoints.
1509
05071a4d
PA
1510* New targets
1511
1512ARM Symbian arm*-*-symbianelf*
1513
6aecb9c2
JB
1514* D language support.
1515 GDB now supports debugging programs written in the D programming
1516 language.
1517
431e49aa
TJB
1518* GDB now supports the extended ptrace interface for PowerPC which is
1519 available since Linux kernel version 2.6.34. This automatically enables
1520 any hardware breakpoints and additional hardware watchpoints available in
1521 the processor. The old ptrace interface exposes just one hardware
1522 watchpoint and no hardware breakpoints.
1523
1524* GDB is now able to use the Data Value Compare (DVC) register available on
1525 embedded PowerPC processors to implement in hardware simple watchpoint
1526 conditions of the form:
1527
1528 watch ADDRESS|VARIABLE if ADDRESS|VARIABLE == CONSTANT EXPRESSION
1529
1530 This works in native GDB running on Linux kernels with the extended ptrace
1531 interface mentioned above.
1532
bfbf3774 1533*** Changes in GDB 7.1
abc7453d 1534
4eef138c
TT
1535* C++ Improvements
1536
1537 ** Namespace Support
71dee663
SW
1538
1539 GDB now supports importing of namespaces in C++. This enables the
1540 user to inspect variables from imported namespaces. Support for
1541 namepace aliasing has also been added. So, if a namespace is
1542 aliased in the current scope (e.g. namepace C=A; ) the user can
1543 print variables using the alias (e.g. (gdb) print C::x).
1544
4eef138c
TT
1545 ** Bug Fixes
1546
1547 All known bugs relating to the printing of virtual base class were
1548 fixed. It is now possible to call overloaded static methods using a
1549 qualified name.
1550
1551 ** Cast Operators
1552
1553 The C++ cast operators static_cast<>, dynamic_cast<>, const_cast<>,
1554 and reinterpret_cast<> are now handled by the C++ expression parser.
1555
2d1c1221
ME
1556* New targets
1557
1558Xilinx MicroBlaze microblaze-*-*
34207b9e 1559Renesas RX rx-*-elf
2d1c1221
ME
1560
1561* New Simulators
1562
1563Xilinx MicroBlaze microblaze
34207b9e 1564Renesas RX rx
2d1c1221 1565
6c95b8df
PA
1566* Multi-program debugging.
1567
1568 GDB now has support for multi-program (a.k.a. multi-executable or
1569 multi-exec) debugging. This allows for debugging multiple inferiors
1570 simultaneously each running a different program under the same GDB
1571 session. See "Debugging Multiple Inferiors and Programs" in the
1572 manual for more information. This implied some user visible changes
1573 in the multi-inferior support. For example, "info inferiors" now
1574 lists inferiors that are not running yet or that have exited
1575 already. See also "New commands" and "New options" below.
1576
d5551862
SS
1577* New tracing features
1578
1579 GDB's tracepoint facility now includes several new features:
1580
1581 ** Trace state variables
f61e138d
SS
1582
1583 GDB tracepoints now include support for trace state variables, which
1584 are variables managed by the target agent during a tracing
1585 experiment. They are useful for tracepoints that trigger each
1586 other, so for instance one tracepoint can count hits in a variable,
1587 and then a second tracepoint has a condition that is true when the
1588 count reaches a particular value. Trace state variables share the
1589 $-syntax of GDB convenience variables, and can appear in both
1590 tracepoint actions and condition expressions. Use the "tvariable"
1591 command to create, and "info tvariables" to view; see "Trace State
1592 Variables" in the manual for more detail.
7a697b8d 1593
d5551862 1594 ** Fast tracepoints
7a697b8d
SS
1595
1596 GDB now includes an option for defining fast tracepoints, which
1597 targets may implement more efficiently, such as by installing a jump
1598 into the target agent rather than a trap instruction. The resulting
1599 speedup can be by two orders of magnitude or more, although the
1600 tradeoff is that some program locations on some target architectures
1601 might not allow fast tracepoint installation, for instance if the
1602 instruction to be replaced is shorter than the jump. To request a
1603 fast tracepoint, use the "ftrace" command, with syntax identical to
1604 the regular trace command.
1605
d5551862
SS
1606 ** Disconnected tracing
1607
1608 It is now possible to detach GDB from the target while it is running
1609 a trace experiment, then reconnect later to see how the experiment
1610 is going. In addition, a new variable disconnected-tracing lets you
1611 tell the target agent whether to continue running a trace if the
1612 connection is lost unexpectedly.
1613
00bf0b85
SS
1614 ** Trace files
1615
1616 GDB now has the ability to save the trace buffer into a file, and
1617 then use that file as a target, similarly to you can do with
1618 corefiles. You can select trace frames, print data that was
1619 collected in them, and use tstatus to display the state of the
1620 tracing run at the moment that it was saved. To create a trace
1621 file, use "tsave <filename>", and to use it, do "target tfile
1622 <name>".
4daf5ac0
SS
1623
1624 ** Circular trace buffer
1625
1626 You can ask the target agent to handle the trace buffer as a
1627 circular buffer, discarding the oldest trace frames to make room for
1628 newer ones, by setting circular-trace-buffer to on. This feature may
1629 not be available for all target agents.
1630
21a0512e
PP
1631* Changed commands
1632
1633disassemble
1634 The disassemble command, when invoked with two arguments, now requires
1635 the arguments to be comma-separated.
1636
0fe7935b
DJ
1637info variables
1638 The info variables command now displays variable definitions. Files
1639 which only declare a variable are not shown.
1640
fb2e7cb4
JB
1641source
1642 The source command is now capable of sourcing Python scripts.
1643 This feature is dependent on the debugger being build with Python
1644 support.
1645
1646 Related to this enhancement is also the introduction of a new command
1647 "set script-extension" (see below).
1648
6c95b8df
PA
1649* New commands (for set/show, see "New options" below)
1650
399cd161
MS
1651record save [<FILENAME>]
1652 Save a file (in core file format) containing the process record
1653 execution log for replay debugging at a later time.
1654
1655record restore <FILENAME>
1656 Restore the process record execution log that was saved at an
1657 earlier time, for replay debugging.
1658
6c95b8df
PA
1659add-inferior [-copies <N>] [-exec <FILENAME>]
1660 Add a new inferior.
1661
1662clone-inferior [-copies <N>] [ID]
1663 Make a new inferior ready to execute the same program another
1664 inferior has loaded.
1665
1666remove-inferior ID
1667 Remove an inferior.
1668
1669maint info program-spaces
1670 List the program spaces loaded into GDB.
1671
9a7071a8
JB
1672set remote interrupt-sequence [Ctrl-C | BREAK | BREAK-g]
1673show remote interrupt-sequence
1674 Allow the user to select one of ^C, a BREAK signal or BREAK-g
1675 as the sequence to the remote target in order to interrupt the execution.
1676 Ctrl-C is a default. Some system prefers BREAK which is high level of
1677 serial line for some certain time. Linux kernel prefers BREAK-g, a.k.a
1678 Magic SysRq g. It is BREAK signal and character 'g'.
1679
1680set remote interrupt-on-connect [on | off]
1681show remote interrupt-on-connect
1682 When interrupt-on-connect is ON, gdb sends interrupt-sequence to
1683 remote target when gdb connects to it. This is needed when you debug
1684 Linux kernel.
1685
1686set remotebreak [on | off]
1687show remotebreak
1688Deprecated. Use "set/show remote interrupt-sequence" instead.
1689
f61e138d
SS
1690tvariable $NAME [ = EXP ]
1691 Create or modify a trace state variable.
1692
1693info tvariables
1694 List trace state variables and their values.
1695
1696delete tvariable $NAME ...
1697 Delete one or more trace state variables.
1698
6da95a67
SS
1699teval EXPR, ...
1700 Evaluate the given expressions without collecting anything into the
1701 trace buffer. (Valid in tracepoint actions only.)
1702
7a697b8d
SS
1703ftrace FN / FILE:LINE / *ADDR
1704 Define a fast tracepoint at the given function, line, or address.
1705
b0f02ee9
JK
1706* New expression syntax
1707
1708 GDB now parses the 0b prefix of binary numbers the same way as GCC does.
1709 GDB now parses 0b101010 identically with 42.
1710
6c95b8df
PA
1711* New options
1712
1713set follow-exec-mode new|same
1714show follow-exec-mode
1715 Control whether GDB reuses the same inferior across an exec call or
1716 creates a new one. This is useful to be able to restart the old
1717 executable after the inferior having done an exec call.
1718
236f1d4d
SS
1719set default-collect EXPR, ...
1720show default-collect
1721 Define a list of expressions to be collected at each tracepoint.
1722 This is a useful way to ensure essential items are not overlooked,
1723 such as registers or a critical global variable.
1724
d5551862
SS
1725set disconnected-tracing
1726show disconnected-tracing
1727 If set to 1, the target is instructed to continue tracing if it
1728 loses its connection to GDB. If 0, the target is to stop tracing
1729 upon disconnection.
1730
4daf5ac0
SS
1731set circular-trace-buffer
1732show circular-trace-buffer
1733 If set to on, the target is instructed to use a circular trace buffer
1734 and discard the oldest trace frames instead of stopping the trace due
1735 to a full trace buffer. If set to off, the trace stops when the buffer
1736 fills up. Some targets may not support this.
1737
fb2e7cb4
JB
1738set script-extension off|soft|strict
1739show script-extension
1740 If set to "off", the debugger does not perform any script language
1741 recognition, and all sourced files are assumed to be GDB scripts.
1742 If set to "soft" (the default), files are sourced according to
1743 filename extension, falling back to GDB scripts if the first
1744 evaluation failed.
1745 If set to "strict", files are sourced according to filename extension.
1746
2b71fc8e
JB
1747set ada trust-PAD-over-XVS on|off
1748show ada trust-PAD-over-XVS
1749 If off, activate a workaround against a bug in the debugging information
1750 generated by the compiler for PAD types (see gcc/exp_dbug.ads in
1751 the GCC sources for more information about the GNAT encoding and
1752 PAD types in particular). It is always safe to set this option to
1753 off, but this introduces a slight performance penalty. The default
1754 is on.
1755
de2e5182
TT
1756* Python API Improvements
1757
1758 ** GDB provides the new class gdb.LazyString. This is useful in
1759 some pretty-printing cases. The new method gdb.Value.lazy_string
1760 provides a simple way to create objects of this type.
1761
1762 ** The fields returned by gdb.Type.fields now have an
1763 `is_base_class' attribute.
1764
1765 ** The new method gdb.Type.range returns the range of an array type.
1766
1767 ** The new method gdb.parse_and_eval can be used to parse and
1768 evaluate an expression.
1769
f61e138d
SS
1770* New remote packets
1771
1772QTDV
1773 Define a trace state variable.
1774
1775qTV
1776 Get the current value of a trace state variable.
1777
d5551862
SS
1778QTDisconnected
1779 Set desired tracing behavior upon disconnection.
1780
4daf5ac0
SS
1781QTBuffer:circular
1782 Set the trace buffer to be linear or circular.
1783
d5551862
SS
1784qTfP, qTsP
1785 Get data about the tracepoints currently in use.
1786
2d483d34
MS
1787* Bug fixes
1788
1789Process record now works correctly with hardware watchpoints.
1790
6e0e5977
JB
1791Multiple bug fixes have been made to the mips-irix port, making it
1792much more reliable. In particular:
1793 - Debugging threaded applications is now possible again. Previously,
1794 GDB would hang while starting the program, or while waiting for
1795 the program to stop at a breakpoint.
1796 - Attaching to a running process no longer hangs.
1797 - An error occurring while loading a core file has been fixed.
1798 - Changing the value of the PC register now works again. This fixes
1799 problems observed when using the "jump" command, or when calling
1800 a function from GDB, or even when assigning a new value to $pc.
1801 - With the "finish" and "return" commands, the return value for functions
1802 returning a small array is now correctly printed.
1803 - It is now possible to break on shared library code which gets executed
1804 during a shared library init phase (code executed while executing
1805 their .init section). Previously, the breakpoint would have no effect.
1806 - GDB is now able to backtrace through the signal handler for
1807 non-threaded programs.
1808
93c26624
JK
1809PIE (Position Independent Executable) programs debugging is now supported.
1810This includes debugging execution of PIC (Position Independent Code) shared
1811libraries although for that, it should be possible to run such libraries as an
1812executable program.
1813
abc7453d 1814*** Changes in GDB 7.0
75feb17d 1815
4efc6507
DE
1816* GDB now has an interface for JIT compilation. Applications that
1817dynamically generate code can create symbol files in memory and register
1818them with GDB. For users, the feature should work transparently, and
1819for JIT developers, the interface is documented in the GDB manual in the
1820"JIT Compilation Interface" chapter.
1821
782b2b07
SS
1822* Tracepoints may now be conditional. The syntax is as for
1823breakpoints; either an "if" clause appended to the "trace" command,
1824or the "condition" command is available. GDB sends the condition to
1825the target for evaluation using the same bytecode format as is used
1826for tracepoint actions.
1827
53a71c06
CR
1828* The disassemble command now supports: an optional /r modifier, print the
1829raw instructions in hex as well as in symbolic form, and an optional /m
1830modifier to print mixed source+assembly.
e6158f16 1831
e7a8dbfb
HZ
1832* Process record and replay
1833
1834 In a architecture environment that supports ``process record and
1835 replay'', ``process record and replay'' target can record a log of
1836 the process execution, and replay it with both forward and reverse
1837 execute commands.
1838
64644d9b
MS
1839* Reverse debugging: GDB now has new commands reverse-continue, reverse-
1840step, reverse-next, reverse-finish, reverse-stepi, reverse-nexti, and
1841set execution-direction {forward|reverse}, for targets that support
1842reverse execution.
1843
b9412953
DD
1844* GDB now supports hardware watchpoints on MIPS/Linux systems. This
1845feature is available with a native GDB running on kernel version
18462.6.28 or later.
1847
6c7a06a3
TT
1848* GDB now has support for multi-byte and wide character sets on the
1849target. Strings whose character type is wchar_t, char16_t, or
1850char32_t are now correctly printed. GDB supports wide- and unicode-
1851literals in C, that is, L'x', L"string", u'x', u"string", U'x', and
1852U"string" syntax. And, GDB allows the "%ls" and "%lc" formats in
1853`printf'. This feature requires iconv to work properly; if your
1854system does not have a working iconv, GDB can use GNU libiconv. See
1855the installation instructions for more information.
1856
f1838a98
UW
1857* GDB now supports automatic retrieval of shared library files from
1858remote targets. To use this feature, specify a system root that begins
1859with the `remote:' prefix, either via the `set sysroot' command or via
1860the `--with-sysroot' configure-time option.
1861
55333a84
DE
1862* "info sharedlibrary" now takes an optional regex of libraries to show,
1863and it now reports if a shared library has no debugging information.
1864
7f6a6314
PM
1865* Commands `set debug-file-directory', `set solib-search-path' and `set args'
1866now complete on file names.
1867
65d12d83
TT
1868* When completing in expressions, gdb will attempt to limit
1869completions to allowable structure or union fields, where appropriate.
1870For instance, consider:
1871
1872 # struct example { int f1; double f2; };
1873 # struct example variable;
1874 (gdb) p variable.
1875
1876If the user types TAB at the end of this command line, the available
1877completions will be "f1" and "f2".
1878
edb3359d
DJ
1879* Inlined functions are now supported. They show up in backtraces, and
1880the "step", "next", and "finish" commands handle them automatically.
1881
2fae03e8
TT
1882* GDB now supports the token-splicing (##) and stringification (#)
1883operators when expanding macros. It also supports variable-arity
1884macros.
1885
47a3467a 1886* GDB now supports inspecting extra signal information, exported by
58d6951d
DJ
1887the new $_siginfo convenience variable. The feature is currently
1888implemented on linux ARM, i386 and amd64.
1889
1890* GDB can now display the VFP floating point registers and NEON vector
1891registers on ARM targets. Both ARM GNU/Linux native GDB and gdbserver
1892can provide these registers (requires Linux 2.6.30 or later). Remote
1893and simulator targets may also provide them.
47a3467a 1894
08388c79
DE
1895* New remote packets
1896
1897qSearch:memory:
1898 Search memory for a sequence of bytes.
1899
a6f3e723
SL
1900QStartNoAckMode
1901 Turn off `+'/`-' protocol acknowledgments to permit more efficient
1902 operation over reliable transport links. Use of this packet is
1903 controlled by the `set remote noack-packet' command.
1904
d7713ae0
EZ
1905vKill
1906 Kill the process with the specified process ID. Use this in preference
1907 to `k' when multiprocess protocol extensions are supported.
1908
07e059b5
VP
1909qXfer:osdata:read
1910 Obtains additional operating system information
1911
47a3467a
PA
1912qXfer:siginfo:read
1913qXfer:siginfo:write
1914 Read or write additional signal information.
1915
060871df
PA
1916* Removed remote protocol undocumented extension
1917
1918 An undocumented extension to the remote protocol's `S' stop reply
1919 packet that permited the stub to pass a process id was removed.
1920 Remote servers should use the `T' stop reply packet instead.
1921
c055b101 1922* GDB now supports multiple function calling conventions according to the
a0ef4274 1923DWARF-2 DW_AT_calling_convention function attribute.
c055b101
CV
1924
1925* The SH target utilizes the aforementioned change to distinguish between gcc
a0ef4274
DJ
1926and Renesas calling convention. It also adds the new CLI commands
1927`set/show sh calling-convention'.
c055b101 1928
31fffb02
CS
1929* GDB can now read compressed debug sections, as produced by GNU gold
1930with the --compress-debug-sections=zlib flag.
1931
88d8a8e0
JB
1932* 64-bit core files are now supported on AIX.
1933
7f99b190
JB
1934* Thread switching is now supported on Tru64.
1935
ccd213ac
DJ
1936* Watchpoints can now be set on unreadable memory locations, e.g. addresses
1937which will be allocated using malloc later in program execution.
1938
1fddbabb 1939* The qXfer:libraries:read remote procotol packet now allows passing a
31fffb02 1940list of section offsets.
1fddbabb 1941
a0ef4274
DJ
1942* On GNU/Linux, GDB can now attach to stopped processes. Several race
1943conditions handling signals delivered during attach or thread creation
1944have also been fixed.
1945
bfb8797a 1946* GDB now supports the use of DWARF boolean types for Ada's type Boolean.
158c7665
PH
1947From the user's standpoint, all unqualified instances of True and False
1948are treated as the standard definitions, regardless of context.
bfb8797a 1949
71c25dea
TT
1950* GDB now parses C++ symbol and type names more flexibly. For
1951example, given:
1952
1953 template<typename T> class C { };
1954 C<char const *> c;
1955
1956GDB will now correctly handle all of:
1957
1958 ptype C<char const *>
1959 ptype C<char const*>
1960 ptype C<const char *>
1961 ptype C<const char*>
1962
ccd213ac
DJ
1963* New features in the GDB remote stub, gdbserver
1964
1965 - The "--wrapper" command-line argument tells gdbserver to use a
1966 wrapper program to launch programs for debugging.
1967
7ae0e2a2
UW
1968 - On PowerPC and S/390 targets, it is now possible to use a single
1969 gdbserver executable to debug both 32-bit and 64-bit programs.
1970 (This requires gdbserver itself to be built as a 64-bit executable.)
1971
a6f3e723
SL
1972 - gdbserver uses the new noack protocol mode for TCP connections to
1973 reduce communications latency, if also supported and enabled in GDB.
1974
da8bd9a3
DJ
1975 - Support for the sparc64-linux-gnu target is now included in
1976 gdbserver.
1977
d70e31dd
DE
1978 - The amd64-linux build of gdbserver now supports debugging both
1979 32-bit and 64-bit programs.
1980
1981 - The i386-linux, amd64-linux, and i386-win32 builds of gdbserver
1982 now support hardware watchpoints, and will use them automatically
1983 as appropriate.
1984
d57a3c85
TJB
1985* Python scripting
1986
1987 GDB now has support for scripting using Python. Whether this is
1988 available is determined at configure time.
1989
d8906c6f
TJB
1990 New GDB commands can now be written in Python.
1991
aadc346a
JB
1992* Ada tasking support
1993
1994 Ada tasks can now be inspected in GDB. The following commands have
1995 been introduced:
1996
1997 info tasks
1998 Print the list of Ada tasks.
1999 info task N
2000 Print detailed information about task number N.
2001 task
2002 Print the task number of the current task.
2003 task N
2004 Switch the context of debugging to task number N.
2005
adb483fe
DJ
2006* Support for user-defined prefixed commands. The "define" command can
2007add new commands to existing prefixes, e.g. "target".
2008
2277426b
PA
2009* Multi-inferior, multi-process debugging.
2010
2011 GDB now has generalized support for multi-inferior debugging. See
2012 "Debugging Multiple Inferiors" in the manual for more information.
2013 Although availability still depends on target support, the command
2014 set is more uniform now. The GNU/Linux specific multi-forks support
2015 has been migrated to this new framework. This implied some user
2016 visible changes; see "New commands" and also "Removed commands"
2017 below.
2018
08d16641
PA
2019* Target descriptions can now describe the target OS ABI. See the
2020"Target Description Format" section in the user manual for more
2021information.
2022
e35359c5
UW
2023* Target descriptions can now describe "compatible" architectures
2024to indicate that the target can execute applications for a different
2025architecture in addition to those for the main target architecture.
2026See the "Target Description Format" section in the user manual for
2027more information.
2028
85e747d2
UW
2029* Multi-architecture debugging.
2030
2031 GDB now includes general supports for debugging applications on
2032 hybrid systems that use more than one single processor architecture
2033 at the same time. Each such hybrid architecture still requires
2034 specific support to be added. The only hybrid architecture supported
2035 in this version of GDB is the Cell Broadband Engine.
2036
2037* GDB now supports integrated debugging of Cell/B.E. applications that
2038use both the PPU and SPU architectures. To enable support for hybrid
2039Cell/B.E. debugging, you need to configure GDB to support both the
2040powerpc-linux or powerpc64-linux and the spu-elf targets, using the
2041--enable-targets configure option.
2042
11ade57a
PA
2043* Non-stop mode debugging.
2044
2045 For some targets, GDB now supports an optional mode of operation in
2046 which you can examine stopped threads while other threads continue
2047 to execute freely. This is referred to as non-stop mode, with the
2048 old mode referred to as all-stop mode. See the "Non-Stop Mode"
2049 section in the user manual for more information.
2050
2051 To be able to support remote non-stop debugging, a remote stub needs
2052 to implement the non-stop mode remote protocol extensions, as
2053 described in the "Remote Non-Stop" section of the user manual. The
2054 GDB remote stub, gdbserver, has been adjusted to support these
2055 extensions on linux targets.
2056
d7713ae0 2057* New commands (for set/show, see "New options" below)
75feb17d 2058
a96d9b2e
SDJ
2059catch syscall [NAME(S) | NUMBER(S)]
2060 Catch system calls. Arguments, which should be names of system
2061 calls or their numbers, mean catch only those syscalls. Without
2062 arguments, every syscall will be caught. When the inferior issues
2063 any of the specified syscalls, GDB will stop and announce the system
2064 call, both when it is called and when its call returns. This
2065 feature is currently available with a native GDB running on the
2066 Linux Kernel, under the following architectures: x86, x86_64,
2067 PowerPC and PowerPC64.
2068
08388c79
DE
2069find [/size-char] [/max-count] start-address, end-address|+search-space-size,
2070 val1 [, val2, ...]
2071 Search memory for a sequence of bytes.
2072
d57a3c85
TJB
2073maint set python print-stack
2074maint show python print-stack
2075 Show a stack trace when an error is encountered in a Python script.
2076
2077python [CODE]
2078 Invoke CODE by passing it to the Python interpreter.
2079
d7713ae0
EZ
2080macro define
2081macro list
2082macro undef
2083 These allow macros to be defined, undefined, and listed
2084 interactively.
2085
2086info os processes
2087 Show operating system information about processes.
2088
2277426b
PA
2089info inferiors
2090 List the inferiors currently under GDB's control.
2091
2092inferior NUM
2093 Switch focus to inferior number NUM.
2094
2095detach inferior NUM
2096 Detach from inferior number NUM.
2097
2098kill inferior NUM
2099 Kill inferior number NUM.
2100
d7713ae0
EZ
2101* New options
2102
3285f3fe
UW
2103set spu stop-on-load
2104show spu stop-on-load
2105 Control whether to stop for new SPE threads during Cell/B.E. debugging.
2106
ff1a52c6
UW
2107set spu auto-flush-cache
2108show spu auto-flush-cache
2109 Control whether to automatically flush the software-managed cache
2110 during Cell/B.E. debugging.
2111
d7713ae0
EZ
2112set sh calling-convention
2113show sh calling-convention
2114 Control the calling convention used when calling SH target functions.
2115
e0a3ce09 2116set debug timestamp
75feb17d 2117show debug timestamp
d7713ae0
EZ
2118 Control display of timestamps with GDB debugging output.
2119
2120set disassemble-next-line
2121show disassemble-next-line
2122 Control display of disassembled source lines or instructions when
2123 the debuggee stops.
2124
2125set remote noack-packet
2126show remote noack-packet
2127 Set/show the use of remote protocol QStartNoAckMode packet. See above
2128 under "New remote packets."
2129
2130set remote query-attached-packet
2131show remote query-attached-packet
2132 Control use of remote protocol `qAttached' (query-attached) packet.
2133
2134set remote read-siginfo-object
2135show remote read-siginfo-object
2136 Control use of remote protocol `qXfer:siginfo:read' (read-siginfo-object)
2137 packet.
2138
2139set remote write-siginfo-object
2140show remote write-siginfo-object
2141 Control use of remote protocol `qXfer:siginfo:write' (write-siginfo-object)
2142 packet.
2143
40ab02ce
MS
2144set remote reverse-continue
2145show remote reverse-continue
2146 Control use of remote protocol 'bc' (reverse-continue) packet.
2147
2148set remote reverse-step
2149show remote reverse-step
2150 Control use of remote protocol 'bs' (reverse-step) packet.
2151
d7713ae0
EZ
2152set displaced-stepping
2153show displaced-stepping
2154 Control displaced stepping mode. Displaced stepping is a way to
2155 single-step over breakpoints without removing them from the debuggee.
2156 Also known as "out-of-line single-stepping".
2157
2158set debug displaced
2159show debug displaced
2160 Control display of debugging info for displaced stepping.
2161
2162maint set internal-error
2163maint show internal-error
2164 Control what GDB does when an internal error is detected.
2165
2166maint set internal-warning
2167maint show internal-warning
2168 Control what GDB does when an internal warning is detected.
75feb17d 2169
ccd213ac
DJ
2170set exec-wrapper
2171show exec-wrapper
2172unset exec-wrapper
2173 Use a wrapper program to launch programs for debugging.
fa4727a6 2174
aad4b048
JB
2175set multiple-symbols (all|ask|cancel)
2176show multiple-symbols
2177 The value of this variable can be changed to adjust the debugger behavior
2178 when an expression or a breakpoint location contains an ambiguous symbol
2179 name (an overloaded function name, for instance).
2180
74960c60
VP
2181set breakpoint always-inserted
2182show breakpoint always-inserted
2183 Keep breakpoints always inserted in the target, as opposed to inserting
2184 them when resuming the target, and removing them when the target stops.
2185 This option can improve debugger performance on slow remote targets.
2186
0428b8f5
DJ
2187set arm fallback-mode (arm|thumb|auto)
2188show arm fallback-mode
2189set arm force-mode (arm|thumb|auto)
2190show arm force-mode
2191 These commands control how ARM GDB determines whether instructions
2192 are ARM or Thumb. The default for both settings is auto, which uses
2193 the current CPSR value for instructions without symbols; previous
2194 versions of GDB behaved as if "set arm fallback-mode arm".
2195
10568435
JK
2196set disable-randomization
2197show disable-randomization
2198 Standalone programs run with the virtual address space randomization enabled
2199 by default on some platforms. This option keeps the addresses stable across
2200 multiple debugging sessions.
2201
d7713ae0
EZ
2202set non-stop
2203show non-stop
2204 Control whether other threads are stopped or not when some thread hits
2205 a breakpoint.
2206
b3eb342c 2207set target-async
d7713ae0 2208show target-async
b3eb342c
VP
2209 Requests that asynchronous execution is enabled in the target, if available.
2210 In this case, it's possible to resume target in the background, and interact
2211 with GDB while the target is running. "show target-async" displays the
2212 current state of asynchronous execution of the target.
2213
6c7a06a3
TT
2214set target-wide-charset
2215show target-wide-charset
2216 The target-wide-charset is the name of the character set that GDB
2217 uses when printing characters whose type is wchar_t.
2218
84603566
SL
2219set tcp auto-retry (on|off)
2220show tcp auto-retry
2221set tcp connect-timeout
2222show tcp connect-timeout
2223 These commands allow GDB to retry failed TCP connections to a remote stub
2224 with a specified timeout period; this is useful if the stub is launched
2225 in parallel with GDB but may not be ready to accept connections immediately.
2226
17a37d48
PP
2227set libthread-db-search-path
2228show libthread-db-search-path
2229 Control list of directories which GDB will search for appropriate
2230 libthread_db.
2231
d4db2f36
PA
2232set schedule-multiple (on|off)
2233show schedule-multiple
2234 Allow GDB to resume all threads of all processes or only threads of
2235 the current process.
2236
4e5d721f
DE
2237set stack-cache
2238show stack-cache
2239 Use more aggressive caching for accesses to the stack. This improves
2240 performance of remote debugging (particularly backtraces) without
2241 affecting correctness.
2242
910c5da8
JB
2243set interactive-mode (on|off|auto)
2244show interactive-mode
2245 Control whether GDB runs in interactive mode (on) or not (off).
2246 When in interactive mode, GDB waits for the user to answer all
2247 queries. Otherwise, GDB does not wait and assumes the default
2248 answer. When set to auto (the default), GDB determines which
2249 mode to use based on the stdin settings.
2250
2277426b
PA
2251* Removed commands
2252
2253info forks
2254 For program forks, this is replaced by the new more generic `info
2255 inferiors' command. To list checkpoints, you can still use the
2256 `info checkpoints' command, which was an alias for the `info forks'
2257 command.
2258
2259fork NUM
2260 Replaced by the new `inferior' command. To switch between
2261 checkpoints, you can still use the `restart' command, which was an
2262 alias for the `fork' command.
2263
2264process PID
2265 This is removed, since some targets don't have a notion of
2266 processes. To switch between processes, you can still use the
2267 `inferior' command using GDB's own inferior number.
2268
2269delete fork NUM
2270 For program forks, this is replaced by the new more generic `kill
2271 inferior' command. To delete a checkpoint, you can still use the
2272 `delete checkpoint' command, which was an alias for the `delete
2273 fork' command.
2274
2275detach fork NUM
2276 For program forks, this is replaced by the new more generic `detach
2277 inferior' command. To detach a checkpoint, you can still use the
2278 `detach checkpoint' command, which was an alias for the `detach
2279 fork' command.
2280
a80b95ba
TG
2281* New native configurations
2282
2283x86/x86_64 Darwin i[34567]86-*-darwin*
2284
b8bfd3ed
JB
2285x86_64 MinGW x86_64-*-mingw*
2286
75a2d5e7
TT
2287* New targets
2288
c28c63d8 2289Lattice Mico32 lm32-*
75a2d5e7 2290x86 DICOS i[34567]86-*-dicos*
4c1d2973 2291x86_64 DICOS x86_64-*-dicos*
5f814c3b 2292S+core 3 score-*-*
75a2d5e7 2293
6de3146c
PA
2294* The GDB remote stub, gdbserver, now supports x86 Windows CE
2295 (mingw32ce) debugging.
2296
d5cbbe6e
JB
2297* Removed commands
2298
2299catch load
2300catch unload
2301 These commands were actually not implemented on any target.
2302
75feb17d 2303*** Changes in GDB 6.8
f9ed52be 2304
af5ca30d
NH
2305* New native configurations
2306
2307NetBSD/hppa hppa*-*netbsd*
94a0e877 2308Xtensa GNU/Linux xtensa*-*-linux*
af5ca30d
NH
2309
2310* New targets
2311
2312NetBSD/hppa hppa*-*-netbsd*
94a0e877 2313Xtensa GNU/Lunux xtensa*-*-linux*
af5ca30d 2314
7a404eba
PA
2315* Change in command line behavior -- corefiles vs. process ids.
2316
2317 When the '-p NUMBER' or '--pid NUMBER' options are used, and
2318 attaching to process NUMBER fails, GDB no longer attempts to open a
2319 core file named NUMBER. Attaching to a program using the -c option
2320 is no longer supported. Instead, use the '-p' or '--pid' options.
2321
430ebac9
PA
2322* GDB can now be built as a native debugger for debugging Windows x86
2323(mingw32) Portable Executable (PE) programs.
2324
fe6fbf8b 2325* Pending breakpoints no longer change their number when their address
8d5f9c6f 2326is resolved.
fe6fbf8b
VP
2327
2328* GDB now supports breakpoints with multiple locations,
8d5f9c6f
DJ
2329including breakpoints on C++ constructors, inside C++ templates,
2330and in inlined functions.
fe6fbf8b 2331
10665d76
JB
2332* GDB's ability to debug optimized code has been improved. GDB more
2333accurately identifies function bodies and lexical blocks that occupy
2334more than one contiguous range of addresses.
2335
7cc46491
DJ
2336* Target descriptions can now describe registers for PowerPC.
2337
d71340b8
DJ
2338* The GDB remote stub, gdbserver, now supports the AltiVec and SPE
2339registers on PowerPC targets.
2340
523c4513
DJ
2341* The GDB remote stub, gdbserver, now supports thread debugging on GNU/Linux
2342targets even when the libthread_db library is not available.
2343
a6b151f1
DJ
2344* The GDB remote stub, gdbserver, now supports the new file transfer
2345commands (remote put, remote get, and remote delete).
2346
2d717e4f
DJ
2347* The GDB remote stub, gdbserver, now supports run and attach in
2348extended-remote mode.
2349
24a836bd 2350* hppa*64*-*-hpux11* target broken
d001be7a
DJ
2351The debugger is unable to start a program and fails with the following
2352error: "Error trying to get information about dynamic linker".
2353The gdb-6.7 release is also affected.
24a836bd 2354
d0c678e6
UW
2355* GDB now supports the --enable-targets= configure option to allow
2356building a single GDB executable that supports multiple remote
2357target architectures.
2358
d64a946d
TJB
2359* GDB now supports debugging C and C++ programs which use the
2360Decimal Floating Point extension. In addition, the PowerPC target
2361now has a set of pseudo-registers to inspect decimal float values
2362stored in two consecutive float registers.
2363
ee163bf5
VP
2364* The -break-insert MI command can optionally create pending
2365breakpoints now.
2366
b93b6ca7 2367* Improved support for debugging Ada
d001be7a
DJ
2368Many improvements to the Ada language support have been made. These
2369include:
b93b6ca7
JB
2370 - Better support for Ada2005 interface types
2371 - Improved handling of arrays and slices in general
2372 - Better support for Taft-amendment types
2373 - The '{type} ADDRESS' expression is now allowed on the left hand-side
2374 of an assignment
2375 - Improved command completion in Ada
2376 - Several bug fixes
2377
d001be7a
DJ
2378* GDB on GNU/Linux and HP/UX can now debug through "exec" of a new
2379process.
2380
a6b151f1
DJ
2381* New commands
2382
6d53d0af
JB
2383set print frame-arguments (all|scalars|none)
2384show print frame-arguments
2385 The value of this variable can be changed to control which argument
2386 values should be printed by the debugger when displaying a frame.
2387
a6b151f1
DJ
2388remote put
2389remote get
2390remote delete
2391 Transfer files to and from a remote target, and delete remote files.
2392
2393* New MI commands
2394
2395-target-file-put
2396-target-file-get
2397-target-file-delete
2398 Transfer files to and from a remote target, and delete remote files.
2399
2400* New remote packets
2401
2402vFile:open:
2403vFile:close:
2404vFile:pread:
2405vFile:pwrite:
2406vFile:unlink:
2407 Open, close, read, write, and delete files on the remote system.
d0c678e6 2408
2d717e4f
DJ
2409vAttach
2410 Attach to an existing process on the remote system, in extended-remote
2411 mode.
2412
2413vRun
2414 Run a new process on the remote system, in extended-remote mode.
2415
8d5f9c6f 2416*** Changes in GDB 6.7
6dd09645 2417
19d378fc
MS
2418* Resolved 101 resource leaks, null pointer dereferences, etc. in gdb,
2419bfd, libiberty and opcodes, as revealed by static analysis donated by
2420Coverity, Inc. (http://scan.coverity.com).
2421
3a40aaa0
UW
2422* When looking up multiply-defined global symbols, GDB will now prefer the
2423symbol definition in the current shared library if it was built using the
2424-Bsymbolic linker option.
2425
a6ec25f2
BW
2426* When the Text User Interface (TUI) is not configured, GDB will now
2427recognize the -tui command-line option and print a message that the TUI
2428is not supported.
2429
6dd09645
JB
2430* The GDB remote stub, gdbserver, now has lower overhead for high
2431frequency signals (e.g. SIGALRM) via the QPassSignals packet.
2432
c9bb8148
DJ
2433* GDB for MIPS targets now autodetects whether a remote target provides
243432-bit or 64-bit register values.
2435
0d5de010
DJ
2436* Support for C++ member pointers has been improved.
2437
23181151
DJ
2438* GDB now understands XML target descriptions, which specify the
2439target's overall architecture. GDB can read a description from
2440a local file or over the remote serial protocol.
2441
ea37ba09
DJ
2442* Vectors of single-byte data use a new integer type which is not
2443automatically displayed as character or string data.
2444
2445* The /s format now works with the print command. It displays
2446arrays of single-byte integers and pointers to single-byte integers
2447as strings.
e1f48ead 2448
123dc839
DJ
2449* Target descriptions can now describe target-specific registers,
2450for architectures which have implemented the support (currently
8d5f9c6f 2451only ARM, M68K, and MIPS).
123dc839 2452
05a4558a
DJ
2453* GDB and the GDB remote stub, gdbserver, now support the XScale
2454iWMMXt coprocessor.
fb1e4ffc 2455
7c963485
PA
2456* The GDB remote stub, gdbserver, has been updated to support
2457ARM Windows CE (mingw32ce) debugging, and GDB Windows CE support
2458has been rewritten to use the standard GDB remote protocol.
2459
b18be20d
DJ
2460* GDB can now step into C++ functions which are called through thunks.
2461
0ca420ce
UW
2462* GDB for the Cell/B.E. SPU now supports overlay debugging.
2463
31d99776
DJ
2464* The GDB remote protocol "qOffsets" packet can now honor ELF segment
2465layout. It also supports a TextSeg= and DataSeg= response when only
2466segment base addresses (rather than offsets) are available.
2467
a4642986
MR
2468* The /i format now outputs any trailing branch delay slot instructions
2469immediately following the last instruction within the count specified.
2470
cfa9d6d9
DJ
2471* The GDB remote protocol "T" stop reply packet now supports a
2472"library" response. Combined with the new "qXfer:libraries:read"
2473packet, this response allows GDB to debug shared libraries on targets
2474where the operating system manages the list of loaded libraries (e.g.
2475Windows and SymbianOS).
255e7678
DJ
2476
2477* The GDB remote stub, gdbserver, now supports dynamic link libraries
2478(DLLs) on Windows and Windows CE targets.
f5db8714
JK
2479
2480* GDB now supports a faster verification that a .debug file matches its binary
2481according to its build-id signature, if the signature is present.
cfa9d6d9 2482
c9bb8148
DJ
2483* New commands
2484
23776285
MR
2485set remoteflow
2486show remoteflow
2487 Enable or disable hardware flow control (RTS/CTS) on the serial port
2488 when debugging using remote targets.
2489
c9bb8148
DJ
2490set mem inaccessible-by-default
2491show mem inaccessible-by-default
2492 If the target supplies a memory map, for instance via the remote
2493 protocol's "qXfer:memory-map:read" packet, setting this variable
2494 prevents GDB from accessing memory outside the memory map. This
2495 is useful for targets with memory mapped registers or which react
2496 badly to accesses of unmapped address space.
2497
2498set breakpoint auto-hw
2499show breakpoint auto-hw
2500 If the target supplies a memory map, for instance via the remote
2501 protocol's "qXfer:memory-map:read" packet, setting this variable
2502 lets GDB use hardware breakpoints automatically for memory regions
2503 where it can not use software breakpoints. This covers both the
2504 "break" command and internal breakpoints used for other commands
2505 including "next" and "finish".
2506
0e420bd8
JB
2507catch exception
2508catch exception unhandled
2509 Stop the program execution when Ada exceptions are raised.
2510
2511catch assert
2512 Stop the program execution when an Ada assertion failed.
2513
f822c95b
DJ
2514set sysroot
2515show sysroot
2516 Set an alternate system root for target files. This is a more
2517 general version of "set solib-absolute-prefix", which is now
2518 an alias to "set sysroot".
2519
83cc5c53
UW
2520info spu
2521 Provide extended SPU facility status information. This set of
2522 commands is available only when debugging the Cell/B.E. SPU
2523 architecture.
2524
bd372731
MK
2525* New native configurations
2526
2527OpenBSD/sh sh*-*openbsd*
2528
23181151
DJ
2529set tdesc filename
2530unset tdesc filename
2531show tdesc filename
2532 Use the specified local file as an XML target description, and do
2533 not query the target for its built-in description.
2534
c9bb8148
DJ
2535* New targets
2536
54fe9172 2537OpenBSD/sh sh*-*-openbsd*
c9bb8148 2538MIPS64 GNU/Linux (gdbserver) mips64-linux-gnu
c077150c 2539Toshiba Media Processor mep-elf
c9bb8148 2540
6dd09645
JB
2541* New remote packets
2542
2543QPassSignals:
2544 Ignore the specified signals; pass them directly to the debugged program
2545 without stopping other threads or reporting them to GDB.
2546
23181151
DJ
2547qXfer:features:read:
2548 Read an XML target description from the target, which describes its
2549 features.
6dd09645 2550
83cc5c53
UW
2551qXfer:spu:read:
2552qXfer:spu:write:
2553 Read or write contents of an spufs file on the target system. These
2554 packets are available only on the Cell/B.E. SPU architecture.
2555
cfa9d6d9
DJ
2556qXfer:libraries:read:
2557 Report the loaded shared libraries. Combined with new "T" packet
2558 response, this packet allows GDB to debug shared libraries on
2559 targets where the operating system manages the list of loaded
2560 libraries (e.g. Windows and SymbianOS).
2561
483367ee
DJ
2562* Removed targets
2563
2564Support for these obsolete configurations has been removed.
2565
d08950c4
UW
2566alpha*-*-osf1*
2567alpha*-*-osf2*
7ce59000 2568d10v-*-*
483367ee
DJ
2569hppa*-*-hiux*
2570i[34567]86-ncr-*
2571i[34567]86-*-dgux*
2572i[34567]86-*-lynxos*
2573i[34567]86-*-netware*
2574i[34567]86-*-sco3.2v5*
2575i[34567]86-*-sco3.2v4*
2576i[34567]86-*-sco*
2577i[34567]86-*-sysv4.2*
2578i[34567]86-*-sysv4*
2579i[34567]86-*-sysv5*
2580i[34567]86-*-unixware2*
2581i[34567]86-*-unixware*
2582i[34567]86-*-sysv*
2583i[34567]86-*-isc*
2584m68*-cisco*-*
2585m68*-tandem-*
ad527d2e 2586mips*-*-pe
483367ee 2587rs6000-*-lynxos*
ad527d2e 2588sh*-*-pe
483367ee 2589
7ce59000
DJ
2590* Other removed features
2591
2592target abug
2593target cpu32bug
2594target est
2595target rom68k
2596
2597 Various m68k-only ROM monitors.
2598
ea35711c
DJ
2599target hms
2600target e7000
2601target sh3
2602target sh3e
2603
2604 Various Renesas ROM monitors and debugging interfaces for SH and
2605 H8/300.
2606
2607target ocd
2608
2609 Support for a Macraigor serial interface to on-chip debugging.
2610 GDB does not directly support the newer parallel or USB
2611 interfaces.
2612
7ce59000
DJ
2613DWARF 1 support
2614
2615 A debug information format. The predecessor to DWARF 2 and
2616 DWARF 3, which are still supported.
2617
54d61198
DJ
2618Support for the HP aCC compiler on HP-UX/PA-RISC
2619
2620 SOM-encapsulated symbolic debugging information, automatic
2621 invocation of pxdb, and the aCC custom C++ ABI. This does not
2622 affect HP-UX for Itanium or GCC for HP-UX/PA-RISC. Code compiled
2623 with aCC can still be debugged on an assembly level.
2624
ea35711c
DJ
2625MIPS ".pdr" sections
2626
2627 A MIPS-specific format used to describe stack frame layout
2628 in debugging information.
2629
2630Scheme support
2631
2632 GDB could work with an older version of Guile to debug
2633 the interpreter and Scheme programs running in it.
2634
1a69e1e4
DJ
2635set mips stack-arg-size
2636set mips saved-gpreg-size
2637
2638 Use "set mips abi" to control parameter passing for MIPS.
2639
6dd09645 2640*** Changes in GDB 6.6
e374b601 2641
ca3bf3bd
DJ
2642* New targets
2643
2644Xtensa xtensa-elf
9c309e77 2645Cell Broadband Engine SPU spu-elf
ca3bf3bd 2646
6aec2e11
DJ
2647* GDB can now be configured as a cross-debugger targeting native Windows
2648(mingw32) or Cygwin. It can communicate with a remote debugging stub
2649running on a Windows system over TCP/IP to debug Windows programs.
2650
2651* The GDB remote stub, gdbserver, has been updated to support Windows and
2652Cygwin debugging. Both single-threaded and multi-threaded programs are
2653supported.
2654
17218d91
DJ
2655* The "set trust-readonly-sections" command works again. This command was
2656broken in GDB 6.3, 6.4, and 6.5.
2657
9ebce043
DJ
2658* The "load" command now supports writing to flash memory, if the remote
2659stub provides the required support.
2660
7d3d3ece
DJ
2661* Support for GNU/Linux Thread Local Storage (TLS, per-thread variables) no
2662longer requires symbolic debug information (e.g. DWARF-2).
2663
4f8253f3
JB
2664* New commands
2665
2666set substitute-path
2667unset substitute-path
2668show substitute-path
2669 Manage a list of substitution rules that GDB uses to rewrite the name
2670 of the directories where the sources are located. This can be useful
2671 for instance when the sources were moved to a different location
2672 between compilation and debugging.
2673
9fa66fd7
AS
2674set trace-commands
2675show trace-commands
2676 Print each CLI command as it is executed. Each command is prefixed with
2677 a number of `+' symbols representing the nesting depth.
2678 The source command now has a `-v' option to enable the same feature.
2679
1f5befc1
DJ
2680* REMOVED features
2681
2682The ARM Demon monitor support (RDP protocol, "target rdp").
2683
2ec3381a
DJ
2684Kernel Object Display, an embedded debugging feature which only worked with
2685an obsolete version of Cisco IOS.
2686
3d00d119
DJ
2687The 'set download-write-size' and 'show download-write-size' commands.
2688
be2a5f71
DJ
2689* New remote packets
2690
2691qSupported:
2692 Tell a stub about GDB client features, and request remote target features.
2693 The first feature implemented is PacketSize, which allows the target to
2694 specify the size of packets it can handle - to minimize the number of
2695 packets required and improve performance when connected to a remote
2696 target.
2697
0876f84a
DJ
2698qXfer:auxv:read:
2699 Fetch an OS auxilliary vector from the remote stub. This packet is a
2700 more efficient replacement for qPart:auxv:read.
2701
9ebce043
DJ
2702qXfer:memory-map:read:
2703 Fetch a memory map from the remote stub, including information about
2704 RAM, ROM, and flash memory devices.
2705
2706vFlashErase:
2707vFlashWrite:
2708vFlashDone:
2709 Erase and program a flash memory device.
2710
0876f84a
DJ
2711* Removed remote packets
2712
2713qPart:auxv:read:
2714 This packet has been replaced by qXfer:auxv:read. Only GDB 6.4 and 6.5
2715 used it, and only gdbserver implemented it.
2716
e374b601 2717*** Changes in GDB 6.5
53e5f3cf 2718
96309189
MS
2719* New targets
2720
2721Renesas M32C/M16C m32c-elf
2722
2723Morpho Technologies ms1 ms1-elf
2724
53e5f3cf
AS
2725* New commands
2726
2727init-if-undefined Initialize a convenience variable, but
2728 only if it doesn't already have a value.
2729
ac264b3b
MS
2730The following commands are presently only implemented for native GNU/Linux:
2731
2732checkpoint Save a snapshot of the program state.
2733
2734restart <n> Return the program state to a
2735 previously saved state.
2736
2737info checkpoints List currently saved checkpoints.
2738
2739delete-checkpoint <n> Delete a previously saved checkpoint.
2740
2741set|show detach-on-fork Tell gdb whether to detach from a newly
2742 forked process, or to keep debugging it.
2743
2744info forks List forks of the user program that
2745 are available to be debugged.
2746
2747fork <n> Switch to debugging one of several
2748 forks of the user program that are
2749 available to be debugged.
2750
2751delete-fork <n> Delete a fork from the list of forks
2752 that are available to be debugged (and
2753 kill the forked process).
2754
2755detach-fork <n> Delete a fork from the list of forks
2756 that are available to be debugged (and
2757 allow the process to continue).
2758
3950dc3f
NS
2759* New architecture
2760
2761Morpho Technologies ms2 ms1-elf
2762
0ea3f30e
DJ
2763* Improved Windows host support
2764
2765GDB now builds as a cross debugger hosted on i686-mingw32, including
2766native console support, and remote communications using either
2767network sockets or serial ports.
2768
f79daebb
GM
2769* Improved Modula-2 language support
2770
2771GDB can now print most types in the Modula-2 syntax. This includes:
2772basic types, set types, record types, enumerated types, range types,
2773pointer types and ARRAY types. Procedure var parameters are correctly
2774printed and hexadecimal addresses and character constants are also
2775written in the Modula-2 syntax. Best results can be obtained by using
2776GNU Modula-2 together with the -gdwarf-2 command line option.
2777
acab6ab2
MM
2778* REMOVED features
2779
2780The ARM rdi-share module.
2781
f4267320
DJ
2782The Netware NLM debug server.
2783
53e5f3cf 2784*** Changes in GDB 6.4
156a53ca 2785
e0ecbda1
MK
2786* New native configurations
2787
02a677ac 2788OpenBSD/arm arm*-*-openbsd*
e0ecbda1
MK
2789OpenBSD/mips64 mips64-*-openbsd*
2790
d64a6579
KB
2791* New targets
2792
2793Morpho Technologies ms1 ms1-elf
2794
b33a6190
AS
2795* New command line options
2796
2797--batch-silent As for --batch, but totally silent.
2798--return-child-result The debugger will exist with the same value
2799 the child (debugged) program exited with.
2800--eval-command COMMAND, -ex COMMAND
2801 Execute a single GDB CLI command. This may be
2802 specified multiple times and in conjunction
2803 with the --command (-x) option.
2804
11dced61
AC
2805* Deprecated commands removed
2806
2807The following commands, that were deprecated in 2000, have been
2808removed:
2809
2810 Command Replacement
2811 set|show arm disassembly-flavor set|show arm disassembler
2812 othernames set arm disassembler
2813 set|show remotedebug set|show debug remote
2814 set|show archdebug set|show debug arch
2815 set|show eventdebug set|show debug event
2816 regs info registers
2817
6fe85783
MK
2818* New BSD user-level threads support
2819
2820It is now possible to debug programs using the user-level threads
2821library on OpenBSD and FreeBSD. Currently supported (target)
2822configurations are:
2823
2824FreeBSD/amd64 x86_64-*-freebsd*
2825FreeBSD/i386 i386-*-freebsd*
2826OpenBSD/i386 i386-*-openbsd*
2827
2828Note that the new kernel threads libraries introduced in FreeBSD 5.x
2829are not yet supported.
2830
5260ca71
MS
2831* New support for Matsushita MN10300 w/sim added
2832(Work in progress). mn10300-elf.
2833
e84ecc99
AC
2834* REMOVED configurations and files
2835
2836VxWorks and the XDR protocol *-*-vxworks
9445aa30 2837Motorola MCORE mcore-*-*
9445aa30 2838National Semiconductor NS32000 ns32k-*-*
156a53ca 2839
31e35378
JB
2840* New "set print array-indexes" command
2841
2842After turning this setting "on", GDB prints the index of each element
2843when displaying arrays. The default is "off" to preserve the previous
2844behavior.
2845
e85e5c83
MK
2846* VAX floating point support
2847
2848GDB now supports the not-quite-ieee VAX F and D floating point formats.
2849
d91e9901
AS
2850* User-defined command support
2851
2852In addition to using $arg0..$arg9 for argument passing, it is now possible
2853to use $argc to determine now many arguments have been passed. See the
2854section on user-defined commands in the user manual for more information.
2855
f2cb65ca
MC
2856*** Changes in GDB 6.3:
2857
f47b1503
AS
2858* New command line option
2859
2860GDB now accepts -l followed by a number to set the timeout for remote
2861debugging.
2862
f2cb65ca
MC
2863* GDB works with GCC -feliminate-dwarf2-dups
2864
2865GDB now supports a more compact representation of DWARF-2 debug
2866information using DW_FORM_ref_addr references. These are produced
2867by GCC with the option -feliminate-dwarf2-dups and also by some
2868proprietary compilers. With GCC, you must use GCC 3.3.4 or later
2869to use -feliminate-dwarf2-dups.
860660cb 2870
d08c0230
AC
2871* Internationalization
2872
2873When supported by the host system, GDB will be built with
2874internationalization (libintl). The task of marking up the sources is
2875continued, we're looking forward to our first translation.
2876
117ea3cf
PH
2877* Ada
2878
2879Initial support for debugging programs compiled with the GNAT
2880implementation of the Ada programming language has been integrated
2881into GDB. In this release, support is limited to expression evaluation.
2882
d08c0230
AC
2883* New native configurations
2884
2885GNU/Linux/m32r m32r-*-linux-gnu
2886
2887* Remote 'p' packet
2888
2889GDB's remote protocol now includes support for the 'p' packet. This
2890packet is used to fetch individual registers from a remote inferior.
2891
2892* END-OF-LIFE registers[] compatibility module
2893
2894GDB's internal register infrastructure has been completely rewritten.
2895The new infrastructure making possible the implementation of key new
2896features including 32x64 (e.g., 64-bit amd64 GDB debugging a 32-bit
2897i386 application).
2898
2899GDB 6.3 will be the last release to include the the registers[]
2900compatibility module that allowed out-of-date configurations to
2901continue to work. This change directly impacts the following
2902configurations:
2903
2904hppa-*-hpux
2905ia64-*-aix
2906mips-*-irix*
2907*-*-lynx
2908mips-*-linux-gnu
2909sds protocol
2910xdr protocol
2911powerpc bdm protocol
2912
2913Unless there is activity to revive these configurations, they will be
2914made OBSOLETE in GDB 6.4, and REMOVED from GDB 6.5.
2915
2916* OBSOLETE configurations and files
2917
2918Configurations that have been declared obsolete in this release have
2919been commented out. Unless there is activity to revive these
2920configurations, the next release of GDB will have their sources
2921permanently REMOVED.
2922
2923h8300-*-*
2924mcore-*-*
2925mn10300-*-*
2926ns32k-*-*
2927sh64-*-*
2928v850-*-*
2929
ebb7c577
AC
2930*** Changes in GDB 6.2.1:
2931
2932* MIPS `break main; run' gave an heuristic-fence-post warning
2933
2934When attempting to run even a simple program, a warning about
2935heuristic-fence-post being hit would be reported. This problem has
2936been fixed.
2937
2938* MIPS IRIX 'long double' crashed GDB
2939
2940When examining a long double variable, GDB would get a segmentation
2941fault. The crash has been fixed (but GDB 6.2 cannot correctly examine
2942IRIX long double values).
2943
2944* VAX and "next"
2945
2946A bug in the VAX stack code was causing problems with the "next"
2947command. This problem has been fixed.
2948
860660cb 2949*** Changes in GDB 6.2:
faae5abe 2950
0dea2468
AC
2951* Fix for ``many threads''
2952
2953On GNU/Linux systems that use the NPTL threads library, a program
2954rapidly creating and deleting threads would confuse GDB leading to the
2955error message:
2956
2957 ptrace: No such process.
2958 thread_db_get_info: cannot get thread info: generic error
2959
2960This problem has been fixed.
2961
2c07db7a
AC
2962* "-async" and "-noasync" options removed.
2963
2964Support for the broken "-noasync" option has been removed (it caused
2965GDB to dump core).
2966
c23968a2
JB
2967* New ``start'' command.
2968
2969This command runs the program until the begining of the main procedure.
2970
71009278
MK
2971* New BSD Kernel Data Access Library (libkvm) interface
2972
2973Using ``target kvm'' it is now possible to debug kernel core dumps and
2974live kernel memory images on various FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD
2975platforms. Currently supported (native-only) configurations are:
2976
2977FreeBSD/amd64 x86_64-*-freebsd*
2978FreeBSD/i386 i?86-*-freebsd*
2979NetBSD/i386 i?86-*-netbsd*
2980NetBSD/m68k m68*-*-netbsd*
2981NetBSD/sparc sparc-*-netbsd*
2982OpenBSD/amd64 x86_64-*-openbsd*
2983OpenBSD/i386 i?86-*-openbsd*
2984OpenBSD/m68k m68*-openbsd*
2985OpenBSD/sparc sparc-*-openbsd*
2986
3c0b7db2
AC
2987* Signal trampoline code overhauled
2988
2989Many generic problems with GDB's signal handling code have been fixed.
2990These include: backtraces through non-contiguous stacks; recognition
2991of sa_sigaction signal trampolines; backtrace from a NULL pointer
2992call; backtrace through a signal trampoline; step into and out of
2993signal handlers; and single-stepping in the signal trampoline.
2994
73cc75f3
AC
2995Please note that kernel bugs are a limiting factor here. These
2996features have been shown to work on an s390 GNU/Linux system that
2997include a 2.6.8-rc1 kernel. Ref PR breakpoints/1702.
3c0b7db2 2998
7243600a
BF
2999* Cygwin support for DWARF 2 added.
3000
6f606e1c
MK
3001* New native configurations
3002
97dc871c 3003GNU/Linux/hppa hppa*-*-linux*
0e56aeaf 3004OpenBSD/hppa hppa*-*-openbsd*
bf2ca189
MK
3005OpenBSD/m68k m68*-*-openbsd*
3006OpenBSD/m88k m88*-*-openbsd*
d195bc9f 3007OpenBSD/powerpc powerpc-*-openbsd*
6f606e1c 3008NetBSD/vax vax-*-netbsd*
9f076e7a 3009OpenBSD/vax vax-*-openbsd*
6f606e1c 3010
a1b461bf
AC
3011* END-OF-LIFE frame compatibility module
3012
3013GDB's internal frame infrastructure has been completely rewritten.
3014The new infrastructure making it possible to support key new features
3015including DWARF 2 Call Frame Information. To aid in the task of
3016migrating old configurations to this new infrastructure, a
3017compatibility module, that allowed old configurations to continue to
3018work, was also included.
3019
3020GDB 6.2 will be the last release to include this frame compatibility
3021module. This change directly impacts the following configurations:
3022
3023h8300-*-*
3024mcore-*-*
3025mn10300-*-*
3026ns32k-*-*
3027sh64-*-*
3028v850-*-*
3029xstormy16-*-*
3030
3031Unless there is activity to revive these configurations, they will be
3032made OBSOLETE in GDB 6.3, and REMOVED from GDB 6.4.
3033
3c7012f5
AC
3034* REMOVED configurations and files
3035
3036Sun 3, running SunOS 3 m68*-*-sunos3*
3037Sun 3, running SunOS 4 m68*-*-sunos4*
3038Sun 2, running SunOS 3 m68000-*-sunos3*
3039Sun 2, running SunOS 4 m68000-*-sunos4*
3040Motorola 680x0 running LynxOS m68*-*-lynxos*
3041AT&T 3b1/Unix pc m68*-att-*
3042Bull DPX2 (68k, System V release 3) m68*-bull-sysv*
3043decstation mips-dec-* mips-little-*
3044riscos mips-*-riscos* mips-*-sysv*
3045sonymips mips-sony-*
3046sysv mips*-*-sysv4* (IRIX 5/6 not included)
3047
e5fe55f7
AC
3048*** Changes in GDB 6.1.1:
3049
3050* TUI (Text-mode User Interface) built-in (also included in GDB 6.1)
3051
3052The TUI (Text-mode User Interface) is now built as part of a default
3053GDB configuration. It is enabled by either selecting the TUI with the
3054command line option "-i=tui" or by running the separate "gdbtui"
3055program. For more information on the TUI, see the manual "Debugging
3056with GDB".
3057
3058* Pending breakpoint support (also included in GDB 6.1)
3059
3060Support has been added to allow you to specify breakpoints in shared
3061libraries that have not yet been loaded. If a breakpoint location
3062cannot be found, and the "breakpoint pending" option is set to auto,
3063GDB queries you if you wish to make the breakpoint pending on a future
3064shared-library load. If and when GDB resolves the breakpoint symbol,
3065the pending breakpoint is removed as one or more regular breakpoints
3066are created.
3067
3068Pending breakpoints are very useful for GCJ Java debugging.
3069
3070* Fixed ISO-C build problems
3071
3072The files bfd/elf-bfd.h, gdb/dictionary.c and gdb/types.c contained
3073non ISO-C code that stopped them being built using a more strict ISO-C
3074compiler (e.g., IBM's C compiler).
3075
3076* Fixed build problem on IRIX 5
3077
3078Due to header problems with <sys/proc.h>, the file gdb/proc-api.c
3079wasn't able to compile compile on an IRIX 5 system.
3080
3081* Added execute permission to gdb/gdbserver/configure
3082
3083The shell script gdb/testsuite/gdb.stabs/configure lacked execute
3084permission. This bug would cause configure to fail on a number of
3085systems (Solaris, IRIX). Ref: server/519.
3086
3087* Fixed build problem on hpux2.0w-hp-hpux11.00 using the HP ANSI C compiler
3088
3089Older HPUX ANSI C compilers did not accept variable array sizes. somsolib.c
3090has been updated to use constant array sizes.
3091
3092* Fixed a panic in the DWARF Call Frame Info code on Solaris 2.7
3093
3094GCC 3.3.2, on Solaris 2.7, includes the DW_EH_PE_funcrel encoding in
3095its generated DWARF Call Frame Info. This encoding was causing GDB to
3096panic, that panic has been fixed. Ref: gdb/1628.
3097
3098* Fixed a problem when examining parameters in shared library code.
3099
3100When examining parameters in optimized shared library code generated
3101by a mainline GCC, GDB would incorrectly report ``Variable "..." is
3102not available''. GDB now correctly displays the variable's value.
3103
faae5abe 3104*** Changes in GDB 6.1:
f2c06f52 3105
9175c9a3
MC
3106* Removed --with-mmalloc
3107
3108Support for the mmalloc memory manager has been removed, as it
3109conflicted with the internal gdb byte cache.
3110
3cc87ec0
MK
3111* Changes in AMD64 configurations
3112
3113The AMD64 target now includes the %cs and %ss registers. As a result
3114the AMD64 remote protocol has changed; this affects the floating-point
3115and SSE registers. If you rely on those registers for your debugging,
3116you should upgrade gdbserver on the remote side.
3117
f0424ef6
MK
3118* Revised SPARC target
3119
3120The SPARC target has been completely revised, incorporating the
3121FreeBSD/sparc64 support that was added for GDB 6.0. As a result
03cebad2
MK
3122support for LynxOS and SunOS 4 has been dropped. Calling functions
3123from within GDB on operating systems with a non-executable stack
3124(Solaris, OpenBSD) now works.
f0424ef6 3125
59659be2
ILT
3126* New C++ demangler
3127
3128GDB has a new C++ demangler which does a better job on the mangled
3129names generated by current versions of g++. It also runs faster, so
3130with this and other changes gdb should now start faster on large C++
3131programs.
3132
9e08b29b
DJ
3133* DWARF 2 Location Expressions
3134
3135GDB support for location expressions has been extended to support function
3136arguments and frame bases. Older versions of GDB could crash when they
3137encountered these.
3138
8dfe8985
DC
3139* C++ nested types and namespaces
3140
3141GDB's support for nested types and namespaces in C++ has been
3142improved, especially if you use the DWARF 2 debugging format. (This
3143is the default for recent versions of GCC on most platforms.)
3144Specifically, if you have a class "Inner" defined within a class or
3145namespace "Outer", then GDB realizes that the class's name is
3146"Outer::Inner", not simply "Inner". This should greatly reduce the
3147frequency of complaints about not finding RTTI symbols. In addition,
3148if you are stopped at inside of a function defined within a namespace,
3149GDB modifies its name lookup accordingly.
3150
cced5e27
MK
3151* New native configurations
3152
3153NetBSD/amd64 x86_64-*-netbsd*
27d1e716 3154OpenBSD/amd64 x86_64-*-openbsd*
2031c21a 3155OpenBSD/alpha alpha*-*-openbsd*
f2cab569
MK
3156OpenBSD/sparc sparc-*-openbsd*
3157OpenBSD/sparc64 sparc64-*-openbsd*
cced5e27 3158
b4b4b794
KI
3159* New debugging protocols
3160
3161M32R with SDI protocol m32r-*-elf*
3162
7989c619
AC
3163* "set prompt-escape-char" command deleted.
3164
3165The command "set prompt-escape-char" has been deleted. This command,
3166and its very obscure effet on GDB's prompt, was never documented,
3167tested, nor mentioned in the NEWS file.
3168
5994185b
AC
3169* OBSOLETE configurations and files
3170
3171Configurations that have been declared obsolete in this release have
3172been commented out. Unless there is activity to revive these
3173configurations, the next release of GDB will have their sources
3174permanently REMOVED.
3175
3176Sun 3, running SunOS 3 m68*-*-sunos3*
3177Sun 3, running SunOS 4 m68*-*-sunos4*
3178Sun 2, running SunOS 3 m68000-*-sunos3*
3179Sun 2, running SunOS 4 m68000-*-sunos4*
3180Motorola 680x0 running LynxOS m68*-*-lynxos*
3181AT&T 3b1/Unix pc m68*-att-*
3182Bull DPX2 (68k, System V release 3) m68*-bull-sysv*
0748d941
AC
3183decstation mips-dec-* mips-little-*
3184riscos mips-*-riscos* mips-*-sysv*
3185sonymips mips-sony-*
3186sysv mips*-*-sysv4* (IRIX 5/6 not included)
5994185b 3187
0ddabb4c
AC
3188* REMOVED configurations and files
3189
3190SGI Irix-4.x mips-sgi-irix4 or iris4
3191SGI Iris (MIPS) running Irix V3: mips-sgi-irix or iris
4a8269c0
AC
3192Z8000 simulator z8k-zilog-none or z8ksim
3193Matsushita MN10200 w/simulator mn10200-*-*
3194H8/500 simulator h8500-hitachi-hms or h8500hms
3195HP/PA running BSD hppa*-*-bsd*
3196HP/PA running OSF/1 hppa*-*-osf*
3197HP/PA Pro target hppa*-*-pro*
3198PMAX (MIPS) running Mach 3.0 mips*-*-mach3*
cf7c5c23 3199386BSD i[3456]86-*-bsd*
4a8269c0
AC
3200Sequent family i[3456]86-sequent-sysv4*
3201 i[3456]86-sequent-sysv*
3202 i[3456]86-sequent-bsd*
f0424ef6
MK
3203SPARC running LynxOS sparc-*-lynxos*
3204SPARC running SunOS 4 sparc-*-sunos4*
4a8269c0
AC
3205Tsqware Sparclet sparclet-*-*
3206Fujitsu SPARClite sparclite-fujitsu-none or sparclite
0ddabb4c 3207
c7f1390e
DJ
3208*** Changes in GDB 6.0:
3209
1fe43d45
AC
3210* Objective-C
3211
3212Support for debugging the Objective-C programming language has been
3213integrated into GDB.
3214
e6beb428
AC
3215* New backtrace mechanism (includes DWARF 2 Call Frame Information).
3216
3217DWARF 2's Call Frame Information makes available compiler generated
3218information that more exactly describes the program's run-time stack.
3219By using this information, GDB is able to provide more robust stack
3220backtraces.
3221
3222The i386, amd64 (nee, x86-64), Alpha, m68hc11, ia64, and m32r targets
3223have been updated to use a new backtrace mechanism which includes
3224DWARF 2 CFI support.
3225
3226* Hosted file I/O.
3227
3228GDB's remote protocol has been extended to include support for hosted
3229file I/O (where the remote target uses GDB's file system). See GDB's
3230remote protocol documentation for details.
3231
3232* All targets using the new architecture framework.
3233
3234All of GDB's targets have been updated to use the new internal
3235architecture framework. The way is now open for future GDB releases
3236to include cross-architecture native debugging support (i386 on amd64,
3237ppc32 on ppc64).
3238
3239* GNU/Linux's Thread Local Storage (TLS)
3240
3241GDB now includes support for for the GNU/Linux implementation of
3242per-thread variables.
3243
3244* GNU/Linux's Native POSIX Thread Library (NPTL)
3245
3246GDB's thread code has been updated to work with either the new
3247GNU/Linux NPTL thread library or the older "LinuxThreads" library.
3248
3249* Separate debug info.
3250
3251GDB, in conjunction with BINUTILS, now supports a mechanism for
3252automatically loading debug information from a separate file. Instead
3253of shipping full debug and non-debug versions of system libraries,
3254system integrators can now instead ship just the stripped libraries
3255and optional debug files.
3256
3257* DWARF 2 Location Expressions
3258
3259DWARF 2 Location Expressions allow the compiler to more completely
3260describe the location of variables (even in optimized code) to the
3261debugger.
3262
3263GDB now includes preliminary support for location expressions (support
3264for DW_OP_piece is still missing).
3265
3266* Java
3267
3268A number of long standing bugs that caused GDB to die while starting a
3269Java application have been fixed. GDB's Java support is now
3270considered "useable".
3271
85f8f974
DJ
3272* GNU/Linux support for fork, vfork, and exec.
3273
3274The "catch fork", "catch exec", "catch vfork", and "set follow-fork-mode"
3275commands are now implemented for GNU/Linux. They require a 2.5.x or later
3276kernel.
3277
0fac0b41
DJ
3278* GDB supports logging output to a file
3279
3280There are two new commands, "set logging" and "show logging", which can be
3281used to capture GDB's output to a file.
f2c06f52 3282
6ad8ae5c
DJ
3283* The meaning of "detach" has changed for gdbserver
3284
3285The "detach" command will now resume the application, as documented. To
3286disconnect from gdbserver and leave it stopped, use the new "disconnect"
3287command.
3288
e286caf2 3289* d10v, m68hc11 `regs' command deprecated
5f601589
AC
3290
3291The `info registers' command has been updated so that it displays the
3292registers using a format identical to the old `regs' command.
3293
d28f9cdf
DJ
3294* Profiling support
3295
3296A new command, "maint set profile on/off", has been added. This command can
3297be used to enable or disable profiling while running GDB, to profile a
3298session or a set of commands. In addition there is a new configure switch,
3299"--enable-profiling", which will cause GDB to be compiled with profiling
3300data, for more informative profiling results.
3301
da0f9dcd
AC
3302* Default MI syntax changed to "mi2".
3303
3304The default MI (machine interface) syntax, enabled by the command line
3305option "-i=mi", has been changed to "mi2". The previous MI syntax,
b68767c1 3306"mi1", can be enabled by specifying the option "-i=mi1".
da0f9dcd
AC
3307
3308Support for the original "mi0" syntax (included in GDB 5.0) has been
3309removed.
3310
fb9b6b35
JJ
3311Fix for gdb/192: removed extraneous space when displaying frame level.
3312Fix for gdb/672: update changelist is now output in mi list format.
3313Fix for gdb/702: a -var-assign that updates the value now shows up
3314 in a subsequent -var-update.
3315
954a4db8
MK
3316* New native configurations.
3317
3318FreeBSD/amd64 x86_64-*-freebsd*
3319
6760f9e6
JB
3320* Multi-arched targets.
3321
b4263afa 3322HP/PA HPUX11 hppa*-*-hpux*
85a453d5 3323Renesas M32R/D w/simulator m32r-*-elf*
6760f9e6 3324
1b831c93
AC
3325* OBSOLETE configurations and files
3326
3327Configurations that have been declared obsolete in this release have
3328been commented out. Unless there is activity to revive these
3329configurations, the next release of GDB will have their sources
3330permanently REMOVED.
3331
8b0e5691 3332Z8000 simulator z8k-zilog-none or z8ksim
67f16606 3333Matsushita MN10200 w/simulator mn10200-*-*
fd2299bd 3334H8/500 simulator h8500-hitachi-hms or h8500hms
56056df7
AC
3335HP/PA running BSD hppa*-*-bsd*
3336HP/PA running OSF/1 hppa*-*-osf*
3337HP/PA Pro target hppa*-*-pro*
78c43945 3338PMAX (MIPS) running Mach 3.0 mips*-*-mach3*
2fbce691
AC
3339Sequent family i[3456]86-sequent-sysv4*
3340 i[3456]86-sequent-sysv*
3341 i[3456]86-sequent-bsd*
f81824a9
AC
3342Tsqware Sparclet sparclet-*-*
3343Fujitsu SPARClite sparclite-fujitsu-none or sparclite
fd2299bd 3344
5835abe7
NC
3345* REMOVED configurations and files
3346
3347V850EA ISA
1b831c93
AC
3348Motorola Delta 88000 running Sys V m88k-motorola-sysv or delta88
3349IBM AIX PS/2 i[3456]86-*-aix
3350i386 running Mach 3.0 i[3456]86-*-mach3*
3351i386 running Mach i[3456]86-*-mach*
3352i386 running OSF/1 i[3456]86-*osf1mk*
3353HP/Apollo 68k Family m68*-apollo*-sysv*,
3354 m68*-apollo*-bsd*,
3355 m68*-hp-bsd*, m68*-hp-hpux*
3356Argonaut Risc Chip (ARC) arc-*-*
3357Mitsubishi D30V d30v-*-*
3358Fujitsu FR30 fr30-*-elf*
3359OS/9000 i[34]86-*-os9k
3360I960 with MON960 i960-*-coff
5835abe7 3361
a094c6fb
AC
3362* MIPS $fp behavior changed
3363
3364The convenience variable $fp, for the MIPS, now consistently returns
3365the address of the current frame's base. Previously, depending on the
3366context, $fp could refer to either $sp or the current frame's base
3367address. See ``8.10 Registers'' in the manual ``Debugging with GDB:
3368The GNU Source-Level Debugger''.
3369
299ffc64 3370*** Changes in GDB 5.3:
37057839 3371
46248966
AC
3372* GNU/Linux shared library multi-threaded performance improved.
3373
3374When debugging a multi-threaded application on GNU/Linux, GDB now uses
3375`/proc', in preference to `ptrace' for memory reads. This may result
3376in an improvement in the start-up time of multi-threaded, shared
3377library applications when run under GDB. One GDB user writes: ``loads
3378shared libs like mad''.
3379
b9d14705 3380* ``gdbserver'' now supports multi-threaded applications on some targets
6da02953 3381
b9d14705
DJ
3382Support for debugging multi-threaded applications which use
3383the GNU/Linux LinuxThreads package has been added for
3384arm*-*-linux*-gnu*, i[3456]86-*-linux*-gnu*, mips*-*-linux*-gnu*,
3385powerpc*-*-linux*-gnu*, and sh*-*-linux*-gnu*.
6da02953 3386
e0e9281e
JB
3387* GDB now supports C/C++ preprocessor macros.
3388
3389GDB now expands preprocessor macro invocations in C/C++ expressions,
3390and provides various commands for showing macro definitions and how
3391they expand.
3392
dd73b9bb
AC
3393The new command `macro expand EXPRESSION' expands any macro
3394invocations in expression, and shows the result.
3395
3396The new command `show macro MACRO-NAME' shows the definition of the
3397macro named MACRO-NAME, and where it was defined.
3398
e0e9281e
JB
3399Most compilers don't include information about macros in the debugging
3400information by default. In GCC 3.1, for example, you need to compile
3401your program with the options `-gdwarf-2 -g3'. If the macro
3402information is present in the executable, GDB will read it.
3403
2250ee0c
CV
3404* Multi-arched targets.
3405
6e3ba3b8
JT
3406DEC Alpha (partial) alpha*-*-*
3407DEC VAX (partial) vax-*-*
2250ee0c 3408NEC V850 v850-*-*
6e3ba3b8 3409National Semiconductor NS32000 (partial) ns32k-*-*
a1789893
GS
3410Motorola 68000 (partial) m68k-*-*
3411Motorola MCORE mcore-*-*
2250ee0c 3412
cd9bfe15 3413* New targets.
e33ce519 3414
456f8b9d
DB
3415Fujitsu FRV architecture added by Red Hat frv*-*-*
3416
e33ce519 3417
da8ca43d
JT
3418* New native configurations
3419
3420Alpha NetBSD alpha*-*-netbsd*
029923d4 3421SH NetBSD sh*-*-netbsdelf*
45888261 3422MIPS NetBSD mips*-*-netbsd*
9ce5c36a 3423UltraSPARC NetBSD sparc64-*-netbsd*
da8ca43d 3424
cd9bfe15
AC
3425* OBSOLETE configurations and files
3426
3427Configurations that have been declared obsolete in this release have
3428been commented out. Unless there is activity to revive these
3429configurations, the next release of GDB will have their sources
3430permanently REMOVED.
3431
92eb23c5 3432Mitsubishi D30V d30v-*-*
a99a9e1b 3433OS/9000 i[34]86-*-os9k
1c7cc583 3434IBM AIX PS/2 i[3456]86-*-aix
7a3085c1 3435Fujitsu FR30 fr30-*-elf*
7fb623f7 3436Motorola Delta 88000 running Sys V m88k-motorola-sysv or delta88
eb4c54a2 3437Argonaut Risc Chip (ARC) arc-*-*
d8ee244c
MK
3438i386 running Mach 3.0 i[3456]86-*-mach3*
3439i386 running Mach i[3456]86-*-mach*
3440i386 running OSF/1 i[3456]86-*osf1mk*
822e978b
AC
3441HP/Apollo 68k Family m68*-apollo*-sysv*,
3442 m68*-apollo*-bsd*,
3443 m68*-hp-bsd*, m68*-hp-hpux*
4d210288 3444I960 with MON960 i960-*-coff
92eb23c5 3445
db034ac5
AC
3446* OBSOLETE languages
3447
3448CHILL, a Pascal like language used by telecommunications companies.
3449
cd9bfe15
AC
3450* REMOVED configurations and files
3451
3452AMD 29k family via UDI a29k-amd-udi, udi29k
3453A29K VxWorks a29k-*-vxworks
3454AMD 29000 embedded, using EBMON a29k-none-none
3455AMD 29000 embedded with COFF a29k-none-coff
3456AMD 29000 embedded with a.out a29k-none-aout
3457
3458testsuite/gdb.hp/gdb.threads-hp/ directory
3459
20f01a46
DH
3460* New command "set max-user-call-depth <nnn>"
3461
3462This command allows the user to limit the call depth of user-defined
3463commands. The default is 1024.
3464
a5941fbf
MK
3465* Changes in FreeBSD/i386 native debugging.
3466
3467Support for the "generate-core-file" has been added.
3468
89743e04
MS
3469* New commands "dump", "append", and "restore".
3470
3471These commands allow data to be copied from target memory
3472to a bfd-format or binary file (dump and append), and back
3473from a file into memory (restore).
37057839 3474
9fb14e79
JB
3475* Improved "next/step" support on multi-processor Alpha Tru64.
3476
3477The previous single-step mechanism could cause unpredictable problems,
3478including the random appearance of SIGSEGV or SIGTRAP signals. The use
3479of a software single-step mechanism prevents this.
3480
2037aebb
AC
3481*** Changes in GDB 5.2.1:
3482
3483* New targets.
3484
3485Atmel AVR avr*-*-*
3486
3487* Bug fixes
3488
3489gdb/182: gdb/323: gdb/237: On alpha, gdb was reporting:
3490mdebugread.c:2443: gdb-internal-error: sect_index_data not initialized
3491Fix, by Joel Brobecker imported from mainline.
3492
3493gdb/439: gdb/291: On some ELF object files, gdb was reporting:
3494dwarf2read.c:1072: gdb-internal-error: sect_index_text not initialize
3495Fix, by Fred Fish, imported from mainline.
3496
3497Dwarf2 .debug_frame & .eh_frame handler improved in many ways.
3498Surprisingly enough, it works now.
3499By Michal Ludvig, imported from mainline.
3500
3501i386 hardware watchpoint support:
3502avoid misses on second run for some targets.
3503By Pierre Muller, imported from mainline.
3504
37057839 3505*** Changes in GDB 5.2:
eb7cedd9 3506
1a703748
MS
3507* New command "set trust-readonly-sections on[off]".
3508
3509This command is a hint that tells gdb that read-only sections
3510really are read-only (ie. that their contents will not change).
3511In this mode, gdb will go to the object file rather than the
3512target to read memory from read-only sections (such as ".text").
3513This can be a significant performance improvement on some
3514(notably embedded) targets.
3515
cefd4ef5
MS
3516* New command "generate-core-file" (or "gcore").
3517
55241689
AC
3518This new gdb command allows the user to drop a core file of the child
3519process state at any time. So far it's been implemented only for
3520GNU/Linux and Solaris, but should be relatively easily ported to other
3521hosts. Argument is core file name (defaults to core.<pid>).
cefd4ef5 3522
352ed7b4
MS
3523* New command line option
3524
3525GDB now accepts --pid or -p followed by a process id.
3526
3527* Change in command line behavior -- corefiles vs. process ids.
3528
3529There is a subtle behavior in the way in which GDB handles
3530command line arguments. The first non-flag argument is always
3531a program to debug, but the second non-flag argument may either
3532be a corefile or a process id. Previously, GDB would attempt to
3533open the second argument as a corefile, and if that failed, would
3534issue a superfluous error message and then attempt to attach it as
3535a process. Now, if the second argument begins with a non-digit,
3536it will be treated as a corefile. If it begins with a digit,
3537GDB will attempt to attach it as a process, and if no such process
3538is found, will then attempt to open it as a corefile.
3539
fe419ffc
RE
3540* Changes in ARM configurations.
3541
3542Multi-arch support is enabled for all ARM configurations. The ARM/NetBSD
3543configuration is fully multi-arch.
3544
eb7cedd9
MK
3545* New native configurations
3546
fe419ffc 3547ARM NetBSD arm*-*-netbsd*
eb7cedd9 3548x86 OpenBSD i[3456]86-*-openbsd*
55241689 3549AMD x86-64 running GNU/Linux x86_64-*-linux-*
768f0842 3550Sparc64 running FreeBSD sparc64-*-freebsd*
eb7cedd9 3551
c9f63e6b
CV
3552* New targets
3553
3554Sanyo XStormy16 xstormy16-elf
3555
9b4ff276
AC
3556* OBSOLETE configurations and files
3557
3558Configurations that have been declared obsolete in this release have
3559been commented out. Unless there is activity to revive these
3560configurations, the next release of GDB will have their sources
3561permanently REMOVED.
3562
3563AMD 29k family via UDI a29k-amd-udi, udi29k
3564A29K VxWorks a29k-*-vxworks
3565AMD 29000 embedded, using EBMON a29k-none-none
3566AMD 29000 embedded with COFF a29k-none-coff
3567AMD 29000 embedded with a.out a29k-none-aout
3568
b4ceaee6 3569testsuite/gdb.hp/gdb.threads-hp/ directory
9b4ff276 3570
e2caac18
AC
3571* REMOVED configurations and files
3572
3573TI TMS320C80 tic80-*-*
7bc65f05 3574WDC 65816 w65-*-*
7768dd6c
AC
3575PowerPC Solaris powerpcle-*-solaris*
3576PowerPC Windows NT powerpcle-*-cygwin32
3577PowerPC Netware powerpc-*-netware*
5e734e1f 3578Harris/CXUX m88k m88*-harris-cxux*
1406caf7
AC
3579Most ns32k hosts and targets ns32k-*-mach3* ns32k-umax-*
3580 ns32k-utek-sysv* ns32k-utek-*
7e24f0b1 3581SunOS 4.0.Xi on i386 i[3456]86-*-sunos*
9b567150 3582Ultracomputer (29K) running Sym1 a29k-nyu-sym1 a29k-*-kern*
3680c638
AC
3583Sony NEWS (68K) running NEWSOS 3.x m68*-sony-sysv news
3584ISI Optimum V (3.05) under 4.3bsd. m68*-isi-*
a752853e 3585Apple Macintosh (MPW) host and target N/A host, powerpc-*-macos*
e2caac18 3586
c2a727fa
TT
3587* Changes to command line processing
3588
3589The new `--args' feature can be used to specify command-line arguments
3590for the inferior from gdb's command line.
3591
467d8519
TT
3592* Changes to key bindings
3593
3594There is a new `operate-and-get-next' function bound to `C-o'.
3595
7072a954
AC
3596*** Changes in GDB 5.1.1
3597
3598Fix compile problem on DJGPP.
3599
3600Fix a problem with floating-point registers on the i386 being
3601corrupted.
3602
3603Fix to stop GDB crashing on .debug_str debug info.
3604
3605Numerous documentation fixes.
3606
3607Numerous testsuite fixes.
3608
34f47bc4 3609*** Changes in GDB 5.1:
139760b7
MK
3610
3611* New native configurations
3612
3613Alpha FreeBSD alpha*-*-freebsd*
3614x86 FreeBSD 3.x and 4.x i[3456]86*-freebsd[34]*
55241689 3615MIPS GNU/Linux mips*-*-linux*
e23194cb
EZ
3616MIPS SGI Irix 6.x mips*-sgi-irix6*
3617ia64 AIX ia64-*-aix*
55241689 3618s390 and s390x GNU/Linux {s390,s390x}-*-linux*
139760b7 3619
bf64bfd6
AC
3620* New targets
3621
def90278 3622Motorola 68HC11 and 68HC12 m68hc11-elf
24be5c34 3623CRIS cris-axis
55241689 3624UltraSparc running GNU/Linux sparc64-*-linux*
def90278 3625
17e78a56 3626* OBSOLETE configurations and files
bf64bfd6
AC
3627
3628x86 FreeBSD before 2.2 i[3456]86*-freebsd{1,2.[01]}*,
9b9c068d 3629Harris/CXUX m88k m88*-harris-cxux*
bb19ff3b
AC
3630Most ns32k hosts and targets ns32k-*-mach3* ns32k-umax-*
3631 ns32k-utek-sysv* ns32k-utek-*
76f4ea53
AC
3632TI TMS320C80 tic80-*-*
3633WDC 65816 w65-*-*
4a1968f4 3634Ultracomputer (29K) running Sym1 a29k-nyu-sym1 a29k-*-kern*
1b2b2c16
AC
3635PowerPC Solaris powerpcle-*-solaris*
3636PowerPC Windows NT powerpcle-*-cygwin32
3637PowerPC Netware powerpc-*-netware*
24f89b68 3638SunOS 4.0.Xi on i386 i[3456]86-*-sunos*
514e603d
AC
3639Sony NEWS (68K) running NEWSOS 3.x m68*-sony-sysv news
3640ISI Optimum V (3.05) under 4.3bsd. m68*-isi-*
d036b4d9 3641Apple Macintosh (MPW) host N/A
bf64bfd6 3642
17e78a56
AC
3643stuff.c (Program to stuff files into a specially prepared space in kdb)
3644kdb-start.c (Main loop for the standalone kernel debugger)
3645
7fcca85b
AC
3646Configurations that have been declared obsolete in this release have
3647been commented out. Unless there is activity to revive these
3648configurations, the next release of GDB will have their sources
3649permanently REMOVED.
3650
a196c81c 3651* REMOVED configurations and files
7fcca85b
AC
3652
3653Altos 3068 m68*-altos-*
3654Convex c1-*-*, c2-*-*
3655Pyramid pyramid-*-*
3656ARM RISCix arm-*-* (as host)
3657Tahoe tahoe-*-*
a196c81c 3658ser-ocd.c *-*-*
bf64bfd6 3659
6d6b80e5 3660* GDB has been converted to ISO C.
e23194cb 3661
6d6b80e5 3662GDB's source code has been converted to ISO C. In particular, the
e23194cb
EZ
3663sources are fully protoized, and rely on standard headers being
3664present.
3665
bf64bfd6
AC
3666* Other news:
3667
e23194cb
EZ
3668* "info symbol" works on platforms which use COFF, ECOFF, XCOFF, and NLM.
3669
3670* The MI enabled by default.
3671
3672The new machine oriented interface (MI) introduced in GDB 5.0 has been
3673revised and enabled by default. Packages which use GDB as a debugging
3674engine behind a UI or another front end are encouraged to switch to
3675using the GDB/MI interface, instead of the old annotations interface
3676which is now deprecated.
3677
3678* Support for debugging Pascal programs.
3679
3680GDB now includes support for debugging Pascal programs. The following
3681main features are supported:
3682
3683 - Pascal-specific data types such as sets;
3684
3685 - automatic recognition of Pascal sources based on file-name
3686 extension;
3687
3688 - Pascal-style display of data types, variables, and functions;
3689
3690 - a Pascal expression parser.
3691
3692However, some important features are not yet supported.
3693
3694 - Pascal string operations are not supported at all;
3695
3696 - there are some problems with boolean types;
3697
3698 - Pascal type hexadecimal constants are not supported
3699 because they conflict with the internal variables format;
3700
3701 - support for Pascal objects and classes is not full yet;
3702
3703 - unlike Pascal, GDB is case-sensitive for symbol names.
3704
3705* Changes in completion.
3706
3707Commands such as `shell', `run' and `set args', which pass arguments
3708to inferior programs, now complete on file names, similar to what
3709users expect at the shell prompt.
3710
3711Commands which accept locations, such as `disassemble', `print',
3712`breakpoint', `until', etc. now complete on filenames as well as
3713program symbols. Thus, if you type "break foob TAB", and the source
3714files linked into the programs include `foobar.c', that file name will
3715be one of the candidates for completion. However, file names are not
3716considered for completion after you typed a colon that delimits a file
3717name from a name of a function in that file, as in "break foo.c:bar".
3718
3719`set demangle-style' completes on available demangling styles.
3720
3721* New platform-independent commands:
3722
3723It is now possible to define a post-hook for a command as well as a
3724hook that runs before the command. For more details, see the
3725documentation of `hookpost' in the GDB manual.
3726
3727* Changes in GNU/Linux native debugging.
3728
d7275149
MK
3729Support for debugging multi-threaded programs has been completely
3730revised for all platforms except m68k and sparc. You can now debug as
3731many threads as your system allows you to have.
3732
e23194cb
EZ
3733Attach/detach is supported for multi-threaded programs.
3734
d7275149
MK
3735Support for SSE registers was added for x86. This doesn't work for
3736multi-threaded programs though.
e23194cb
EZ
3737
3738* Changes in MIPS configurations.
bf64bfd6
AC
3739
3740Multi-arch support is enabled for all MIPS configurations.
3741
e23194cb
EZ
3742GDB can now be built as native debugger on SGI Irix 6.x systems for
3743debugging n32 executables. (Debugging 64-bit executables is not yet
3744supported.)
3745
3746* Unified support for hardware watchpoints in all x86 configurations.
3747
3748Most (if not all) native x86 configurations support hardware-assisted
3749breakpoints and watchpoints in a unified manner. This support
3750implements debug register sharing between watchpoints, which allows to
3751put a virtually infinite number of watchpoints on the same address,
3752and also supports watching regions up to 16 bytes with several debug
3753registers.
3754
3755The new maintenance command `maintenance show-debug-regs' toggles
3756debugging print-outs in functions that insert, remove, and test
3757watchpoints and hardware breakpoints.
3758
3759* Changes in the DJGPP native configuration.
3760
3761New command ``info dos sysinfo'' displays assorted information about
3762the CPU, OS, memory, and DPMI server.
3763
3764New commands ``info dos gdt'', ``info dos ldt'', and ``info dos idt''
3765display information about segment descriptors stored in GDT, LDT, and
3766IDT.
3767
3768New commands ``info dos pde'' and ``info dos pte'' display entries
3769from Page Directory and Page Tables (for now works with CWSDPMI only).
3770New command ``info dos address-pte'' displays the Page Table entry for
3771a given linear address.
3772
3773GDB can now pass command lines longer than 126 characters to the
3774program being debugged (requires an update to the libdbg.a library
3775which is part of the DJGPP development kit).
3776
3777DWARF2 debug info is now supported.
3778
6c56c069
EZ
3779It is now possible to `step' and `next' through calls to `longjmp'.
3780
e23194cb
EZ
3781* Changes in documentation.
3782
3783All GDB documentation was converted to GFDL, the GNU Free
3784Documentation License.
3785
3786Tracepoints-related commands are now fully documented in the GDB
3787manual.
3788
3789TUI, the Text-mode User Interface, is now documented in the manual.
3790
3791Tracepoints-related commands are now fully documented in the GDB
3792manual.
3793
3794The "GDB Internals" manual now has an index. It also includes
3795documentation of `ui_out' functions, GDB coding standards, x86
3796hardware watchpoints, and memory region attributes.
3797
5d6640b1
AC
3798* GDB's version number moved to ``version.in''
3799
3800The Makefile variable VERSION has been replaced by the file
3801``version.in''. People creating GDB distributions should update the
3802contents of this file.
3803
1a1d8446
AC
3804* gdba.el deleted
3805
3806GUD support is now a standard part of the EMACS distribution.
139760b7 3807
9debab2f 3808*** Changes in GDB 5.0:
7a292a7a 3809
c63ce875
EZ
3810* Improved support for debugging FP programs on x86 targets
3811
3812Unified and much-improved support for debugging floating-point
3813programs on all x86 targets. In particular, ``info float'' now
3814displays the FP registers in the same format on all x86 targets, with
3815greater level of detail.
3816
3817* Improvements and bugfixes in hardware-assisted watchpoints
3818
3819It is now possible to watch array elements, struct members, and
3820bitfields with hardware-assisted watchpoints. Data-read watchpoints
3821on x86 targets no longer erroneously trigger when the address is
3822written.
3823
3824* Improvements in the native DJGPP version of GDB
3825
3826The distribution now includes all the scripts and auxiliary files
3827necessary to build the native DJGPP version on MS-DOS/MS-Windows
3828machines ``out of the box''.
3829
3830The DJGPP version can now debug programs that use signals. It is
3831possible to catch signals that happened in the debuggee, deliver
3832signals to it, interrupt it with Ctrl-C, etc. (Previously, a signal
3833would kill the program being debugged.) Programs that hook hardware
3834interrupts (keyboard, timer, etc.) can also be debugged.
3835
3836It is now possible to debug DJGPP programs that redirect their
3837standard handles or switch them to raw (as opposed to cooked) mode, or
3838even close them. The command ``run < foo > bar'' works as expected,
3839and ``info terminal'' reports useful information about the debuggee's
3840terminal, including raw/cooked mode, redirection, etc.
3841
3842The DJGPP version now uses termios functions for console I/O, which
3843enables debugging graphics programs. Interrupting GDB with Ctrl-C
3844also works.
3845
3846DOS-style file names with drive letters are now fully supported by
3847GDB.
3848
3849It is now possible to debug DJGPP programs that switch their working
3850directory. It is also possible to rerun the debuggee any number of
3851times without restarting GDB; thus, you can use the same setup,
3852breakpoints, etc. for many debugging sessions.
3853
ed9a39eb
JM
3854* New native configurations
3855
3856ARM GNU/Linux arm*-*-linux*
afc05dd4 3857PowerPC GNU/Linux powerpc-*-linux*
ed9a39eb 3858
7a292a7a
SS
3859* New targets
3860
96baa820 3861Motorola MCore mcore-*-*
adf40b2e
JM
3862x86 VxWorks i[3456]86-*-vxworks*
3863PowerPC VxWorks powerpc-*-vxworks*
7a292a7a
SS
3864TI TMS320C80 tic80-*-*
3865
085dd6e6
JM
3866* OBSOLETE configurations
3867
3868Altos 3068 m68*-altos-*
3869Convex c1-*-*, c2-*-*
9846de1b 3870Pyramid pyramid-*-*
ed9a39eb 3871ARM RISCix arm-*-* (as host)
104c1213 3872Tahoe tahoe-*-*
7a292a7a 3873
9debab2f
AC
3874Configurations that have been declared obsolete will be commented out,
3875but the code will be left in place. If there is no activity to revive
3876these configurations before the next release of GDB, the sources will
3877be permanently REMOVED.
3878
5330533d
SS
3879* Gould support removed
3880
3881Support for the Gould PowerNode and NP1 has been removed.
3882
bc9e5bbf
AC
3883* New features for SVR4
3884
3885On SVR4 native platforms (such as Solaris), if you attach to a process
3886without first loading a symbol file, GDB will now attempt to locate and
3887load symbols from the running process's executable file.
3888
3889* Many C++ enhancements
3890
3891C++ support has been greatly improved. Overload resolution now works properly
3892in almost all cases. RTTI support is on the way.
3893
adf40b2e
JM
3894* Remote targets can connect to a sub-program
3895
3896A popen(3) style serial-device has been added. This device starts a
3897sub-process (such as a stand-alone simulator) and then communicates
3898with that. The sub-program to run is specified using the syntax
3899``|<program> <args>'' vis:
3900
3901 (gdb) set remotedebug 1
3902 (gdb) target extended-remote |mn10300-elf-sim program-args
3903
43e526b9
JM
3904* MIPS 64 remote protocol
3905
3906A long standing bug in the mips64 remote protocol where by GDB
3907expected certain 32 bit registers (ex SR) to be transfered as 32
3908instead of 64 bits has been fixed.
3909
3910The command ``set remote-mips64-transfers-32bit-regs on'' has been
3911added to provide backward compatibility with older versions of GDB.
3912
96baa820
JM
3913* ``set remotebinarydownload'' replaced by ``set remote X-packet''
3914
3915The command ``set remotebinarydownload'' command has been replaced by
3916``set remote X-packet''. Other commands in ``set remote'' family
3917include ``set remote P-packet''.
3918
11cf8741
JM
3919* Breakpoint commands accept ranges.
3920
3921The breakpoint commands ``enable'', ``disable'', and ``delete'' now
3922accept a range of breakpoints, e.g. ``5-7''. The tracepoint command
3923``tracepoint passcount'' also accepts a range of tracepoints.
3924
7876dd43
DB
3925* ``apropos'' command added.
3926
3927The ``apropos'' command searches through command names and
3928documentation strings, printing out matches, making it much easier to
3929try to find a command that does what you are looking for.
3930
bc9e5bbf
AC
3931* New MI interface
3932
3933A new machine oriented interface (MI) has been added to GDB. This
3934interface is designed for debug environments running GDB as a separate
7162c0ca
EZ
3935process. This is part of the long term libGDB project. See the
3936"GDB/MI" chapter of the GDB manual for further information. It can be
3937enabled by configuring with:
bc9e5bbf
AC
3938
3939 .../configure --enable-gdbmi
3940
c906108c
SS
3941*** Changes in GDB-4.18:
3942
3943* New native configurations
3944
3945HP-UX 10.20 hppa*-*-hpux10.20
3946HP-UX 11.x hppa*-*-hpux11.0*
55241689 3947M68K GNU/Linux m68*-*-linux*
c906108c
SS
3948
3949* New targets
3950
3951Fujitsu FR30 fr30-*-elf*
3952Intel StrongARM strongarm-*-*
3953Mitsubishi D30V d30v-*-*
3954
3955* OBSOLETE configurations
3956
3957Gould PowerNode, NP1 np1-*-*, pn-*-*
3958
3959Configurations that have been declared obsolete will be commented out,
3960but the code will be left in place. If there is no activity to revive
3961these configurations before the next release of GDB, the sources will
3962be permanently REMOVED.
3963
3964* ANSI/ISO C
3965
3966As a compatibility experiment, GDB's source files buildsym.h and
3967buildsym.c have been converted to pure standard C, no longer
3968containing any K&R compatibility code. We believe that all systems in
3969use today either come with a standard C compiler, or have a GCC port
3970available. If this is not true, please report the affected
3971configuration to bug-gdb@gnu.org immediately. See the README file for
3972information about getting a standard C compiler if you don't have one
3973already.
3974
3975* Readline 2.2
3976
3977GDB now uses readline 2.2.
3978
3979* set extension-language
3980
3981You can now control the mapping between filename extensions and source
3982languages by using the `set extension-language' command. For instance,
3983you can ask GDB to treat .c files as C++ by saying
3984 set extension-language .c c++
3985The command `info extensions' lists all of the recognized extensions
3986and their associated languages.
3987
3988* Setting processor type for PowerPC and RS/6000
3989
3990When GDB is configured for a powerpc*-*-* or an rs6000*-*-* target,
3991you can use the `set processor' command to specify what variant of the
3992PowerPC family you are debugging. The command
3993
3994 set processor NAME
3995
3996sets the PowerPC/RS6000 variant to NAME. GDB knows about the
3997following PowerPC and RS6000 variants:
3998
3999 ppc-uisa PowerPC UISA - a PPC processor as viewed by user-level code
4000 rs6000 IBM RS6000 ("POWER") architecture, user-level view
4001 403 IBM PowerPC 403
4002 403GC IBM PowerPC 403GC
4003 505 Motorola PowerPC 505
4004 860 Motorola PowerPC 860 or 850
4005 601 Motorola PowerPC 601
4006 602 Motorola PowerPC 602
4007 603 Motorola/IBM PowerPC 603 or 603e
4008 604 Motorola PowerPC 604 or 604e
4009 750 Motorola/IBM PowerPC 750 or 750
4010
4011At the moment, this command just tells GDB what to name the
4012special-purpose processor registers. Since almost all the affected
4013registers are inaccessible to user-level programs, this command is
4014only useful for remote debugging in its present form.
4015
4016* HP-UX support
4017
4018Thanks to a major code donation from Hewlett-Packard, GDB now has much
4019more extensive support for HP-UX. Added features include shared
4020library support, kernel threads and hardware watchpoints for 11.00,
4021support for HP's ANSI C and C++ compilers, and a compatibility mode
4022for xdb and dbx commands.
4023
4024* Catchpoints
4025
4026HP's donation includes the new concept of catchpoints, which is a
4027generalization of the old catch command. On HP-UX, it is now possible
4028to catch exec, fork, and vfork, as well as library loading.
4029
4030This means that the existing catch command has changed; its first
4031argument now specifies the type of catch to be set up. See the
4032output of "help catch" for a list of catchpoint types.
4033
4034* Debugging across forks
4035
4036On HP-UX, you can choose which process to debug when a fork() happens
4037in the inferior.
4038
4039* TUI
4040
4041HP has donated a curses-based terminal user interface (TUI). To get
4042it, build with --enable-tui. Although this can be enabled for any
4043configuration, at present it only works for native HP debugging.
4044
4045* GDB remote protocol additions
4046
4047A new protocol packet 'X' that writes binary data is now available.
4048Default behavior is to try 'X', then drop back to 'M' if the stub
4049fails to respond. The settable variable `remotebinarydownload'
4050allows explicit control over the use of 'X'.
4051
4052For 64-bit targets, the memory packets ('M' and 'm') can now contain a
4053full 64-bit address. The command
4054
4055 set remoteaddresssize 32
4056
4057can be used to revert to the old behaviour. For existing remote stubs
4058the change should not be noticed, as the additional address information
4059will be discarded.
4060
4061In order to assist in debugging stubs, you may use the maintenance
4062command `packet' to send any text string to the stub. For instance,
4063
4064 maint packet heythere
4065
4066sends the packet "$heythere#<checksum>". Note that it is very easy to
4067disrupt a debugging session by sending the wrong packet at the wrong
4068time.
4069
4070The compare-sections command allows you to compare section data on the
4071target to what is in the executable file without uploading or
4072downloading, by comparing CRC checksums.
4073
4074* Tracing can collect general expressions
4075
4076You may now collect general expressions at tracepoints. This requires
4077further additions to the target-side stub; see tracepoint.c and
4078doc/agentexpr.texi for further details.
4079
4080* mask-address variable for Mips
4081
4082For Mips targets, you may control the zeroing of the upper 32 bits of
4083a 64-bit address by entering `set mask-address on'. This is mainly
4084of interest to users of embedded R4xxx and R5xxx processors.
4085
4086* Higher serial baud rates
4087
4088GDB's serial code now allows you to specify baud rates 57600, 115200,
4089230400, and 460800 baud. (Note that your host system may not be able
4090to achieve all of these rates.)
4091
4092* i960 simulator
4093
4094The i960 configuration now includes an initial implementation of a
4095builtin simulator, contributed by Jim Wilson.
4096
4097
4098*** Changes in GDB-4.17:
4099
4100* New native configurations
4101
4102Alpha GNU/Linux alpha*-*-linux*
4103Unixware 2.x i[3456]86-unixware2*
4104Irix 6.x mips*-sgi-irix6*
4105PowerPC GNU/Linux powerpc-*-linux*
4106PowerPC Solaris powerpcle-*-solaris*
4107Sparc GNU/Linux sparc-*-linux*
4108Motorola sysV68 R3V7.1 m68k-motorola-sysv
4109
4110* New targets
4111
4112Argonaut Risc Chip (ARC) arc-*-*
4113Hitachi H8/300S h8300*-*-*
4114Matsushita MN10200 w/simulator mn10200-*-*
4115Matsushita MN10300 w/simulator mn10300-*-*
4116MIPS NEC VR4100 mips64*vr4100*{,el}-*-elf*
4117MIPS NEC VR5000 mips64*vr5000*{,el}-*-elf*
4118MIPS Toshiba TX39 mips64*tx39*{,el}-*-elf*
4119Mitsubishi D10V w/simulator d10v-*-*
4120Mitsubishi M32R/D w/simulator m32r-*-elf*
4121Tsqware Sparclet sparclet-*-*
4122NEC V850 w/simulator v850-*-*
4123
4124* New debugging protocols
4125
4126ARM with RDI protocol arm*-*-*
4127M68K with dBUG monitor m68*-*-{aout,coff,elf}
4128DDB and LSI variants of PMON protocol mips*-*-*
4129PowerPC with DINK32 monitor powerpc{,le}-*-eabi
4130PowerPC with SDS protocol powerpc{,le}-*-eabi
4131Macraigor OCD (Wiggler) devices powerpc{,le}-*-eabi
4132
4133* DWARF 2
4134
4135All configurations can now understand and use the DWARF 2 debugging
4136format. The choice is automatic, if the symbol file contains DWARF 2
4137information.
4138
4139* Java frontend
4140
4141GDB now includes basic Java language support. This support is
4142only useful with Java compilers that produce native machine code.
4143
4144* solib-absolute-prefix and solib-search-path
4145
4146For SunOS and SVR4 shared libraries, you may now set the prefix for
4147loading absolute shared library symbol files, and the search path for
4148locating non-absolute shared library symbol files.
4149
4150* Live range splitting
4151
4152GDB can now effectively debug code for which GCC has performed live
4153range splitting as part of its optimization. See gdb/doc/LRS for
4154more details on the expected format of the stabs information.
4155
4156* Hurd support
4157
4158GDB's support for the GNU Hurd, including thread debugging, has been
4159updated to work with current versions of the Hurd.
4160
4161* ARM Thumb support
4162
4163GDB's ARM target configuration now handles the ARM7T (Thumb) 16-bit
4164instruction set. ARM GDB automatically detects when Thumb
4165instructions are in use, and adjusts disassembly and backtracing
4166accordingly.
4167
4168* MIPS16 support
4169
4170GDB's MIPS target configurations now handle the MIP16 16-bit
4171instruction set.
4172
4173* Overlay support
4174
4175GDB now includes support for overlays; if an executable has been
4176linked such that multiple sections are based at the same address, GDB
4177will decide which section to use for symbolic info. You can choose to
4178control the decision manually, using overlay commands, or implement
4179additional target-side support and use "overlay load-target" to bring
4180in the overlay mapping. Do "help overlay" for more detail.
4181
4182* info symbol
4183
4184The command "info symbol <address>" displays information about
4185the symbol at the specified address.
4186
4187* Trace support
4188
4189The standard remote protocol now includes an extension that allows
4190asynchronous collection and display of trace data. This requires
4191extensive support in the target-side debugging stub. Tracing mode
4192includes a new interaction mode in GDB and new commands: see the
4193file tracepoint.c for more details.
4194
4195* MIPS simulator
4196
4197Configurations for embedded MIPS now include a simulator contributed
4198by Cygnus Solutions. The simulator supports the instruction sets
4199of most MIPS variants.
4200
4201* Sparc simulator
4202
4203Sparc configurations may now include the ERC32 simulator contributed
4204by the European Space Agency. The simulator is not built into
4205Sparc targets by default; configure with --enable-sim to include it.
4206
4207* set architecture
4208
4209For target configurations that may include multiple variants of a
4210basic architecture (such as MIPS and SH), you may now set the
4211architecture explicitly. "set arch" sets, "info arch" lists
4212the possible architectures.
4213
4214*** Changes in GDB-4.16:
4215
4216* New native configurations
4217
4218Windows 95, x86 Windows NT i[345]86-*-cygwin32
4219M68K NetBSD m68k-*-netbsd*
4220PowerPC AIX 4.x powerpc-*-aix*
4221PowerPC MacOS powerpc-*-macos*
4222PowerPC Windows NT powerpcle-*-cygwin32
4223RS/6000 AIX 4.x rs6000-*-aix4*
4224
4225* New targets
4226
4227ARM with RDP protocol arm-*-*
4228I960 with MON960 i960-*-coff
4229MIPS VxWorks mips*-*-vxworks*
4230MIPS VR4300 with PMON mips64*vr4300{,el}-*-elf*
4231PowerPC with PPCBUG monitor powerpc{,le}-*-eabi*
4232Hitachi SH3 sh-*-*
4233Matra Sparclet sparclet-*-*
4234
4235* PowerPC simulator
4236
4237The powerpc-eabi configuration now includes the PSIM simulator,
4238contributed by Andrew Cagney, with assistance from Mike Meissner.
4239PSIM is a very elaborate model of the PowerPC, including not only
4240basic instruction set execution, but also details of execution unit
4241performance and I/O hardware. See sim/ppc/README for more details.
4242
4243* Solaris 2.5
4244
4245GDB now works with Solaris 2.5.
4246
4247* Windows 95/NT native
4248
4249GDB will now work as a native debugger on Windows 95 and Windows NT.
4250To build it from source, you must use the "gnu-win32" environment,
4251which uses a DLL to emulate enough of Unix to run the GNU tools.
4252Further information, binaries, and sources are available at
4253ftp.cygnus.com, under pub/gnu-win32.
4254
4255* dont-repeat command
4256
4257If a user-defined command includes the command `dont-repeat', then the
4258command will not be repeated if the user just types return. This is
4259useful if the command is time-consuming to run, so that accidental
4260extra keystrokes don't run the same command many times.
4261
4262* Send break instead of ^C
4263
4264The standard remote protocol now includes an option to send a break
4265rather than a ^C to the target in order to interrupt it. By default,
4266GDB will send ^C; to send a break, set the variable `remotebreak' to 1.
4267
4268* Remote protocol timeout
4269
4270The standard remote protocol includes a new variable `remotetimeout'
4271that allows you to set the number of seconds before GDB gives up trying
4272to read from the target. The default value is 2.
4273
4274* Automatic tracking of dynamic object loading (HPUX and Solaris only)
4275
4276By default GDB will automatically keep track of objects as they are
4277loaded and unloaded by the dynamic linker. By using the command `set
4278stop-on-solib-events 1' you can arrange for GDB to stop the inferior
4279when shared library events occur, thus allowing you to set breakpoints
4280in shared libraries which are explicitly loaded by the inferior.
4281
4282Note this feature does not work on hpux8. On hpux9 you must link
4283/usr/lib/end.o into your program. This feature should work
4284automatically on hpux10.
4285
4286* Irix 5.x hardware watchpoint support
4287
4288Irix 5 configurations now support the use of hardware watchpoints.
4289
4290* Mips protocol "SYN garbage limit"
4291
4292When debugging a Mips target using the `target mips' protocol, you
4293may set the number of characters that GDB will ignore by setting
4294the `syn-garbage-limit'. A value of -1 means that GDB will ignore
4295every character. The default value is 1050.
4296
4297* Recording and replaying remote debug sessions
4298
4299If you set `remotelogfile' to the name of a file, gdb will write to it
4300a recording of a remote debug session. This recording may then be
4301replayed back to gdb using "gdbreplay". See gdbserver/README for
4302details. This is useful when you have a problem with GDB while doing
4303remote debugging; you can make a recording of the session and send it
4304to someone else, who can then recreate the problem.
4305
4306* Speedups for remote debugging
4307
4308GDB includes speedups for downloading and stepping MIPS systems using
4309the IDT monitor, fast downloads to the Hitachi SH E7000 emulator,
4310and more efficient S-record downloading.
4311
4312* Memory use reductions and statistics collection
4313
4314GDB now uses less memory and reports statistics about memory usage.
4315Try the `maint print statistics' command, for example.
4316
4317*** Changes in GDB-4.15:
4318
4319* Psymtabs for XCOFF
4320
4321The symbol reader for AIX GDB now uses partial symbol tables. This
4322can greatly improve startup time, especially for large executables.
4323
4324* Remote targets use caching
4325
4326Remote targets now use a data cache to speed up communication with the
4327remote side. The data cache could lead to incorrect results because
4328it doesn't know about volatile variables, thus making it impossible to
4329debug targets which use memory mapped I/O devices. `set remotecache
4330off' turns the the data cache off.
4331
4332* Remote targets may have threads
4333
4334The standard remote protocol now includes support for multiple threads
4335in the target system, using new protocol commands 'H' and 'T'. See
4336gdb/remote.c for details.
4337
4338* NetROM support
4339
4340If GDB is configured with `--enable-netrom', then it will include
4341support for the NetROM ROM emulator from XLNT Designs. The NetROM
4342acts as though it is a bank of ROM on the target board, but you can
4343write into it over the network. GDB's support consists only of
4344support for fast loading into the emulated ROM; to debug, you must use
4345another protocol, such as standard remote protocol. The usual
4346sequence is something like
4347
4348 target nrom <netrom-hostname>
4349 load <prog>
4350 target remote <netrom-hostname>:1235
4351
4352* Macintosh host
4353
4354GDB now includes support for the Apple Macintosh, as a host only. It
4355may be run as either an MPW tool or as a standalone application, and
4356it can debug through the serial port. All the usual GDB commands are
4357available, but to the target command, you must supply "serial" as the
4358device type instead of "/dev/ttyXX". See mpw-README in the main
4359directory for more information on how to build. The MPW configuration
4360scripts */mpw-config.in support only a few targets, and only the
4361mips-idt-ecoff target has been tested.
4362
4363* Autoconf
4364
4365GDB configuration now uses autoconf. This is not user-visible,
4366but does simplify configuration and building.
4367
4368* hpux10
4369
4370GDB now supports hpux10.
4371
4372*** Changes in GDB-4.14:
4373
4374* New native configurations
4375
4376x86 FreeBSD i[345]86-*-freebsd
4377x86 NetBSD i[345]86-*-netbsd
4378NS32k NetBSD ns32k-*-netbsd
4379Sparc NetBSD sparc-*-netbsd
4380
4381* New targets
4382
4383A29K VxWorks a29k-*-vxworks
4384HP PA PRO embedded (WinBond W89K & Oki OP50N) hppa*-*-pro*
4385CPU32 EST-300 emulator m68*-*-est*
4386PowerPC ELF powerpc-*-elf
4387WDC 65816 w65-*-*
4388
4389* Alpha OSF/1 support for procfs
4390
4391GDB now supports procfs under OSF/1-2.x and higher, which makes it
4392possible to attach to running processes. As the mounting of the /proc
4393filesystem is optional on the Alpha, GDB automatically determines
4394the availability of /proc during startup. This can lead to problems
4395if /proc is unmounted after GDB has been started.
4396
4397* Arguments to user-defined commands
4398
4399User commands may accept up to 10 arguments separated by whitespace.
4400Arguments are accessed within the user command via $arg0..$arg9. A
4401trivial example:
4402define adder
4403 print $arg0 + $arg1 + $arg2
4404
4405To execute the command use:
4406adder 1 2 3
4407
4408Defines the command "adder" which prints the sum of its three arguments.
4409Note the arguments are text substitutions, so they may reference variables,
4410use complex expressions, or even perform inferior function calls.
4411
4412* New `if' and `while' commands
4413
4414This makes it possible to write more sophisticated user-defined
4415commands. Both commands take a single argument, which is the
4416expression to evaluate, and must be followed by the commands to
4417execute, one per line, if the expression is nonzero, the list being
4418terminated by the word `end'. The `if' command list may include an
4419`else' word, which causes the following commands to be executed only
4420if the expression is zero.
4421
4422* Fortran source language mode
4423
4424GDB now includes partial support for Fortran 77. It will recognize
4425Fortran programs and can evaluate a subset of Fortran expressions, but
4426variables and functions may not be handled correctly. GDB will work
4427with G77, but does not yet know much about symbols emitted by other
4428Fortran compilers.
4429
4430* Better HPUX support
4431
4432Most debugging facilities now work on dynamic executables for HPPAs
4433running hpux9 or later. You can attach to running dynamically linked
4434processes, but by default the dynamic libraries will be read-only, so
4435for instance you won't be able to put breakpoints in them. To change
4436that behavior do the following before running the program:
4437
4438 adb -w a.out
4439 __dld_flags?W 0x5
4440 control-d
4441
4442This will cause the libraries to be mapped private and read-write.
4443To revert to the normal behavior, do this:
4444
4445 adb -w a.out
4446 __dld_flags?W 0x4
4447 control-d
4448
4449You cannot set breakpoints or examine data in the library until after
4450the library is loaded if the function/data symbols do not have
4451external linkage.
4452
4453GDB can now also read debug symbols produced by the HP C compiler on
4454HPPAs (sorry, no C++, Fortran or 68k support).
4455
4456* Target byte order now dynamically selectable
4457
4458You can choose which byte order to use with a target system, via the
4459commands "set endian big" and "set endian little", and you can see the
4460current setting by using "show endian". You can also give the command
4461"set endian auto", in which case GDB will use the byte order
4462associated with the executable. Currently, only embedded MIPS
4463configurations support dynamic selection of target byte order.
4464
4465* New DOS host serial code
4466
4467This version uses DPMI interrupts to handle buffered I/O, so you
4468no longer need to run asynctsr when debugging boards connected to
4469a PC's serial port.
4470
4471*** Changes in GDB-4.13:
4472
4473* New "complete" command
4474
4475This lists all the possible completions for the rest of the line, if it
4476were to be given as a command itself. This is intended for use by emacs.
4477
4478* Trailing space optional in prompt
4479
4480"set prompt" no longer adds a space for you after the prompt you set. This
4481allows you to set a prompt which ends in a space or one that does not.
4482
4483* Breakpoint hit counts
4484
4485"info break" now displays a count of the number of times the breakpoint
4486has been hit. This is especially useful in conjunction with "ignore"; you
4487can ignore a large number of breakpoint hits, look at the breakpoint info
4488to see how many times the breakpoint was hit, then run again, ignoring one
4489less than that number, and this will get you quickly to the last hit of
4490that breakpoint.
4491
4492* Ability to stop printing at NULL character
4493
4494"set print null-stop" will cause GDB to stop printing the characters of
4495an array when the first NULL is encountered. This is useful when large
4496arrays actually contain only short strings.
4497
4498* Shared library breakpoints
4499
4500In SunOS 4.x, SVR4, and Alpha OSF/1 configurations, you can now set
4501breakpoints in shared libraries before the executable is run.
4502
4503* Hardware watchpoints
4504
4505There is a new hardware breakpoint for the watch command for sparclite
4506targets. See gdb/sparclite/hw_breakpoint.note.
4507
55241689 4508Hardware watchpoints are also now supported under GNU/Linux.
c906108c
SS
4509
4510* Annotations
4511
4512Annotations have been added. These are for use with graphical interfaces,
4513and are still experimental. Currently only gdba.el uses these.
4514
4515* Improved Irix 5 support
4516
4517GDB now works properly with Irix 5.2.
4518
4519* Improved HPPA support
4520
4521GDB now works properly with the latest GCC and GAS.
4522
4523* New native configurations
4524
4525Sequent PTX4 i[34]86-sequent-ptx4
4526HPPA running OSF/1 hppa*-*-osf*
4527Atari TT running SVR4 m68*-*-sysv4*
4528RS/6000 LynxOS rs6000-*-lynxos*
4529
4530* New targets
4531
4532OS/9000 i[34]86-*-os9k
4533MIPS R4000 mips64*{,el}-*-{ecoff,elf}
4534Sparc64 sparc64-*-*
4535
4536* Hitachi SH7000 and E7000-PC ICE support
4537
4538There is now support for communicating with the Hitachi E7000-PC ICE.
4539This is available automatically when GDB is configured for the SH.
4540
4541* Fixes
4542
4543As usual, a variety of small fixes and improvements, both generic
4544and configuration-specific. See the ChangeLog for more detail.
4545
4546*** Changes in GDB-4.12:
4547
4548* Irix 5 is now supported
4549
4550* HPPA support
4551
4552GDB-4.12 on the HPPA has a number of changes which make it unable
4553to debug the output from the currently released versions of GCC and
4554GAS (GCC 2.5.8 and GAS-2.2 or PAGAS-1.36). Until the next major release
4555of GCC and GAS, versions of these tools designed to work with GDB-4.12
4556can be retrieved via anonymous ftp from jaguar.cs.utah.edu:/dist.
4557
4558
4559*** Changes in GDB-4.11:
4560
4561* User visible changes:
4562
4563* Remote Debugging
4564
4565The "set remotedebug" option is now consistent between the mips remote
4566target, remote targets using the gdb-specific protocol, UDI (AMD's
4567debug protocol for the 29k) and the 88k bug monitor. It is now an
4568integer specifying a debug level (normally 0 or 1, but 2 means more
4569debugging info for the mips target).
4570
4571* DEC Alpha native support
4572
4573GDB now works on the DEC Alpha. GCC 2.4.5 does not produce usable
4574debug info, but GDB works fairly well with the DEC compiler and should
4575work with a future GCC release. See the README file for a few
4576Alpha-specific notes.
4577
4578* Preliminary thread implementation
4579
4580GDB now has preliminary thread support for both SGI/Irix and LynxOS.
4581
4582* LynxOS native and target support for 386
4583
4584This release has been hosted on LynxOS 2.2, and also can be configured
4585to remotely debug programs running under LynxOS (see gdb/gdbserver/README
4586for details).
4587
4588* Improvements in C++ mangling/demangling.
4589
4590This release has much better g++ debugging, specifically in name
4591mangling/demangling, virtual function calls, print virtual table,
4592call methods, ...etc.
4593
4594*** Changes in GDB-4.10:
4595
4596 * User visible changes:
4597
4598Remote debugging using the GDB-specific (`target remote') protocol now
4599supports the `load' command. This is only useful if you have some
4600other way of getting the stub to the target system, and you can put it
4601somewhere in memory where it won't get clobbered by the download.
4602
4603Filename completion now works.
4604
4605When run under emacs mode, the "info line" command now causes the
4606arrow to point to the line specified. Also, "info line" prints
4607addresses in symbolic form (as well as hex).
4608
4609All vxworks based targets now support a user settable option, called
4610vxworks-timeout. This option represents the number of seconds gdb
4611should wait for responses to rpc's. You might want to use this if
4612your vxworks target is, perhaps, a slow software simulator or happens
4613to be on the far side of a thin network line.
4614
4615 * DEC alpha support
4616
4617This release contains support for using a DEC alpha as a GDB host for
4618cross debugging. Native alpha debugging is not supported yet.
4619
4620
4621*** Changes in GDB-4.9:
4622
4623 * Testsuite
4624
4625This is the first GDB release which is accompanied by a matching testsuite.
4626The testsuite requires installation of dejagnu, which should be available
4627via ftp from most sites that carry GNU software.
4628
4629 * C++ demangling
4630
4631'Cfront' style demangling has had its name changed to 'ARM' style, to
4632emphasize that it was written from the specifications in the C++ Annotated
4633Reference Manual, not necessarily to be compatible with AT&T cfront. Despite
4634disclaimers, it still generated too much confusion with users attempting to
4635use gdb with AT&T cfront.
4636
4637 * Simulators
4638
4639GDB now uses a standard remote interface to a simulator library.
4640So far, the library contains simulators for the Zilog Z8001/2, the
4641Hitachi H8/300, H8/500 and Super-H.
4642
4643 * New targets supported
4644
4645H8/300 simulator h8300-hitachi-hms or h8300hms
4646H8/500 simulator h8500-hitachi-hms or h8500hms
4647SH simulator sh-hitachi-hms or sh
4648Z8000 simulator z8k-zilog-none or z8ksim
4649IDT MIPS board over serial line mips-idt-ecoff
4650
4651Cross-debugging to GO32 targets is supported. It requires a custom
4652version of the i386-stub.c module which is integrated with the
4653GO32 memory extender.
4654
4655 * New remote protocols
4656
4657MIPS remote debugging protocol.
4658
4659 * New source languages supported
4660
4661This version includes preliminary support for Chill, a Pascal like language
4662used by telecommunications companies. Chill support is also being integrated
4663into the GNU compiler, but we don't know when it will be publically available.
4664
4665
4666*** Changes in GDB-4.8:
4667
4668 * HP Precision Architecture supported
4669
4670GDB now supports HP PA-RISC machines running HPUX. A preliminary
4671version of this support was available as a set of patches from the
4672University of Utah. GDB does not support debugging of programs
4673compiled with the HP compiler, because HP will not document their file
4674format. Instead, you must use GCC (version 2.3.2 or later) and PA-GAS
4675(as available from jaguar.cs.utah.edu:/dist/pa-gas.u4.tar.Z).
4676
4677Many problems in the preliminary version have been fixed.
4678
4679 * Faster and better demangling
4680
4681We have improved template demangling and fixed numerous bugs in the GNU style
4682demangler. It can now handle type modifiers such as `static' or `const'. Wide
4683character types (wchar_t) are now supported. Demangling of each symbol is now
4684only done once, and is cached when the symbol table for a file is read in.
4685This results in a small increase in memory usage for C programs, a moderate
4686increase in memory usage for C++ programs, and a fantastic speedup in
4687symbol lookups.
4688
4689`Cfront' style demangling still doesn't work with AT&T cfront. It was written
4690from the specifications in the Annotated Reference Manual, which AT&T's
4691compiler does not actually implement.
4692
4693 * G++ multiple inheritance compiler problem
4694
4695In the 2.3.2 release of gcc/g++, how the compiler resolves multiple
4696inheritance lattices was reworked to properly discover ambiguities. We
4697recently found an example which causes this new algorithm to fail in a
4698very subtle way, producing bad debug information for those classes.
4699The file 'gcc.patch' (in this directory) can be applied to gcc to
4700circumvent the problem. A future GCC release will contain a complete
4701fix.
4702
4703The previous G++ debug info problem (mentioned below for the gdb-4.7
4704release) is fixed in gcc version 2.3.2.
4705
4706 * Improved configure script
4707
4708The `configure' script will now attempt to guess your system type if
4709you don't supply a host system type. The old scheme of supplying a
4710host system triplet is preferable over using this. All the magic is
4711done in the new `config.guess' script. Examine it for details.
4712
4713We have also brought our configure script much more in line with the FSF's
4714version. It now supports the --with-xxx options. In particular,
4715`--with-minimal-bfd' can be used to make the GDB binary image smaller.
4716The resulting GDB will not be able to read arbitrary object file formats --
4717only the format ``expected'' to be used on the configured target system.
4718We hope to make this the default in a future release.
4719
4720 * Documentation improvements
4721
4722There's new internal documentation on how to modify GDB, and how to
4723produce clean changes to the code. We implore people to read it
4724before submitting changes.
4725
4726The GDB manual uses new, sexy Texinfo conditionals, rather than arcane
4727M4 macros. The new texinfo.tex is provided in this release. Pre-built
4728`info' files are also provided. To build `info' files from scratch,
4729you will need the latest `makeinfo' release, which will be available in
4730a future texinfo-X.Y release.
4731
4732*NOTE* The new texinfo.tex can cause old versions of TeX to hang.
4733We're not sure exactly which versions have this problem, but it has
4734been seen in 3.0. We highly recommend upgrading to TeX version 3.141
4735or better. If that isn't possible, there is a patch in
4736`texinfo/tex3patch' that will modify `texinfo/texinfo.tex' to work
4737around this problem.
4738
4739 * New features
4740
4741GDB now supports array constants that can be used in expressions typed in by
4742the user. The syntax is `{element, element, ...}'. Ie: you can now type
4743`print {1, 2, 3}', and it will build up an array in memory malloc'd in
4744the target program.
4745
4746The new directory `gdb/sparclite' contains a program that demonstrates
4747how the sparc-stub.c remote stub runs on a Fujitsu SPARClite processor.
4748
4749 * New native hosts supported
4750
4751HP/PA-RISC under HPUX using GNU tools hppa1.1-hp-hpux
4752386 CPUs running SCO Unix 3.2v4 i386-unknown-sco3.2v4
4753
4754 * New targets supported
4755
4756AMD 29k family via UDI a29k-amd-udi or udi29k
4757
4758 * New file formats supported
4759
4760BFD now supports reading HP/PA-RISC executables (SOM file format?),
4761HPUX core files, and SCO 3.2v2 core files.
4762
4763 * Major bug fixes
4764
4765Attaching to processes now works again; thanks for the many bug reports.
4766
4767We have also stomped on a bunch of core dumps caused by
4768printf_filtered("%s") problems.
4769
4770We eliminated a copyright problem on the rpc and ptrace header files
4771for VxWorks, which was discovered at the last minute during the 4.7
4772release. You should now be able to build a VxWorks GDB.
4773
4774You can now interrupt gdb while an attached process is running. This
4775will cause the attached process to stop, and give control back to GDB.
4776
4777We fixed problems caused by using too many file descriptors
4778for reading symbols from object files and libraries. This was
4779especially a problem for programs that used many (~100) shared
4780libraries.
4781
4782The `step' command now only enters a subroutine if there is line number
4783information for the subroutine. Otherwise it acts like the `next'
4784command. Previously, `step' would enter subroutines if there was
4785any debugging information about the routine. This avoids problems
4786when using `cc -g1' on MIPS machines.
4787
4788 * Internal improvements
4789
4790GDB's internal interfaces have been improved to make it easier to support
4791debugging of multiple languages in the future.
4792
4793GDB now uses a common structure for symbol information internally.
4794Minimal symbols (derived from linkage symbols in object files), partial
4795symbols (from a quick scan of debug information), and full symbols
4796contain a common subset of information, making it easier to write
4797shared code that handles any of them.
4798
4799 * New command line options
4800
4801We now accept --silent as an alias for --quiet.
4802
4803 * Mmalloc licensing
4804
4805The memory-mapped-malloc library is now licensed under the GNU Library
4806General Public License.
4807
4808*** Changes in GDB-4.7:
4809
4810 * Host/native/target split
4811
4812GDB has had some major internal surgery to untangle the support for
4813hosts and remote targets. Now, when you configure GDB for a remote
4814target, it will no longer load in all of the support for debugging
4815local programs on the host. When fully completed and tested, this will
4816ensure that arbitrary host/target combinations are possible.
4817
4818The primary conceptual shift is to separate the non-portable code in
4819GDB into three categories. Host specific code is required any time GDB
4820is compiled on that host, regardless of the target. Target specific
4821code relates to the peculiarities of the target, but can be compiled on
4822any host. Native specific code is everything else: it can only be
4823built when the host and target are the same system. Child process
4824handling and core file support are two common `native' examples.
4825
4826GDB's use of /proc for controlling Unix child processes is now cleaner.
4827It has been split out into a single module under the `target_ops' vector,
4828plus two native-dependent functions for each system that uses /proc.
4829
4830 * New hosts supported
4831
4832HP/Apollo 68k (under the BSD domain) m68k-apollo-bsd or apollo68bsd
4833386 CPUs running various BSD ports i386-unknown-bsd or 386bsd
4834386 CPUs running SCO Unix i386-unknown-scosysv322 or i386sco
4835
4836 * New targets supported
4837
4838Fujitsu SPARClite sparclite-fujitsu-none or sparclite
483968030 and CPU32 m68030-*-*, m68332-*-*
4840
4841 * New native hosts supported
4842
4843386 CPUs running various BSD ports i386-unknown-bsd or 386bsd
4844 (386bsd is not well tested yet)
4845386 CPUs running SCO Unix i386-unknown-scosysv322 or sco
4846
4847 * New file formats supported
4848
4849BFD now supports COFF files for the Zilog Z8000 microprocessor. It
4850supports reading of `a.out.adobe' object files, which are an a.out
4851format extended with minimal information about multiple sections.
4852
4853 * New commands
4854
4855`show copying' is the same as the old `info copying'.
4856`show warranty' is the same as `info warrantee'.
4857These were renamed for consistency. The old commands continue to work.
4858
4859`info handle' is a new alias for `info signals'.
4860
4861You can now define pre-command hooks, which attach arbitrary command
4862scripts to any command. The commands in the hook will be executed
4863prior to the user's command. You can also create a hook which will be
4864executed whenever the program stops. See gdb.texinfo.
4865
4866 * C++ improvements
4867
4868We now deal with Cfront style name mangling, and can even extract type
4869info from mangled symbols. GDB can automatically figure out which
4870symbol mangling style your C++ compiler uses.
4871
4872Calling of methods and virtual functions has been improved as well.
4873
4874 * Major bug fixes
4875
4876The crash that occured when debugging Sun Ansi-C compiled binaries is
4877fixed. This was due to mishandling of the extra N_SO stabs output
4878by the compiler.
4879
4880We also finally got Ultrix 4.2 running in house, and fixed core file
4881support, with help from a dozen people on the net.
4882
4883John M. Farrell discovered that the reason that single-stepping was so
4884slow on all of the Mips based platforms (primarily SGI and DEC) was
4885that we were trying to demangle and lookup a symbol used for internal
4886purposes on every instruction that was being stepped through. Changing
4887the name of that symbol so that it couldn't be mistaken for a C++
4888mangled symbol sped things up a great deal.
4889
4890Rich Pixley sped up symbol lookups in general by getting much smarter
4891about when C++ symbol mangling is necessary. This should make symbol
4892completion (TAB on the command line) much faster. It's not as fast as
4893we'd like, but it's significantly faster than gdb-4.6.
4894
4895 * AMD 29k support
4896
4897A new user controllable variable 'call_scratch_address' can
4898specify the location of a scratch area to be used when GDB
4899calls a function in the target. This is necessary because the
4900usual method of putting the scratch area on the stack does not work
4901in systems that have separate instruction and data spaces.
4902
4903We integrated changes to support the 29k UDI (Universal Debugger
4904Interface), but discovered at the last minute that we didn't have all
4905of the appropriate copyright paperwork. We are working with AMD to
4906resolve this, and hope to have it available soon.
4907
4908 * Remote interfaces
4909
4910We have sped up the remote serial line protocol, especially for targets
4911with lots of registers. It now supports a new `expedited status' ('T')
4912message which can be used in place of the existing 'S' status message.
4913This allows the remote stub to send only the registers that GDB
4914needs to make a quick decision about single-stepping or conditional
4915breakpoints, eliminating the need to fetch the entire register set for
4916each instruction being stepped through.
4917
4918The GDB remote serial protocol now implements a write-through cache for
4919registers, only re-reading the registers if the target has run.
4920
4921There is also a new remote serial stub for SPARC processors. You can
4922find it in gdb-4.7/gdb/sparc-stub.c. This was written to support the
4923Fujitsu SPARClite processor, but will run on any stand-alone SPARC
4924processor with a serial port.
4925
4926 * Configuration
4927
4928Configure.in files have become much easier to read and modify. A new
4929`table driven' format makes it more obvious what configurations are
4930supported, and what files each one uses.
4931
4932 * Library changes
4933
4934There is a new opcodes library which will eventually contain all of the
4935disassembly routines and opcode tables. At present, it only contains
4936Sparc and Z8000 routines. This will allow the assembler, debugger, and
4937disassembler (binutils/objdump) to share these routines.
4938
4939The libiberty library is now copylefted under the GNU Library General
4940Public License. This allows more liberal use, and was done so libg++
4941can use it. This makes no difference to GDB, since the Library License
4942grants all the rights from the General Public License.
4943
4944 * Documentation
4945
4946The file gdb-4.7/gdb/doc/stabs.texinfo is a (relatively) complete
4947reference to the stabs symbol info used by the debugger. It is (as far
4948as we know) the only published document on this fascinating topic. We
4949encourage you to read it, compare it to the stabs information on your
4950system, and send improvements on the document in general (to
4951bug-gdb@prep.ai.mit.edu).
4952
4953And, of course, many bugs have been fixed.
4954
4955
4956*** Changes in GDB-4.6:
4957
4958 * Better support for C++ function names
4959
4960GDB now accepts as input the "demangled form" of C++ overloaded function
4961names and member function names, and can do command completion on such names
4962(using TAB, TAB-TAB, and ESC-?). The names have to be quoted with a pair of
4963single quotes. Examples are 'func (int, long)' and 'obj::operator==(obj&)'.
4964Make use of command completion, it is your friend.
4965
4966GDB also now accepts a variety of C++ mangled symbol formats. They are
4967the GNU g++ style, the Cfront (ARM) style, and the Lucid (lcc) style.
4968You can tell GDB which format to use by doing a 'set demangle-style {gnu,
4969lucid, cfront, auto}'. 'gnu' is the default. Do a 'set demangle-style foo'
4970for the list of formats.
4971
4972 * G++ symbol mangling problem
4973
4974Recent versions of gcc have a bug in how they emit debugging information for
4975C++ methods (when using dbx-style stabs). The file 'gcc.patch' (in this
4976directory) can be applied to gcc to fix the problem. Alternatively, if you
4977can't fix gcc, you can #define GCC_MANGLE_BUG when compling gdb/symtab.c. The
4978usual symptom is difficulty with setting breakpoints on methods. GDB complains
4979about the method being non-existent. (We believe that version 2.2.2 of GCC has
4980this problem.)
4981
4982 * New 'maintenance' command
4983
4984All of the commands related to hacking GDB internals have been moved out of
4985the main command set, and now live behind the 'maintenance' command. This
4986can also be abbreviated as 'mt'. The following changes were made:
4987
4988 dump-me -> maintenance dump-me
4989 info all-breakpoints -> maintenance info breakpoints
4990 printmsyms -> maintenance print msyms
4991 printobjfiles -> maintenance print objfiles
4992 printpsyms -> maintenance print psymbols
4993 printsyms -> maintenance print symbols
4994
4995The following commands are new:
4996
4997 maintenance demangle Call internal GDB demangler routine to
4998 demangle a C++ link name and prints the result.
4999 maintenance print type Print a type chain for a given symbol
5000
5001 * Change to .gdbinit file processing
5002
5003We now read the $HOME/.gdbinit file before processing the argv arguments
5004(e.g. reading symbol files or core files). This allows global parameters to
5005be set, which will apply during the symbol reading. The ./.gdbinit is still
5006read after argv processing.
5007
5008 * New hosts supported
5009
5010Solaris-2.0 !!! sparc-sun-solaris2 or sun4sol2
5011
55241689 5012GNU/Linux support i386-unknown-linux or linux
c906108c
SS
5013
5014We are also including code to support the HP/PA running BSD and HPUX. This
5015is almost guaranteed not to work, as we didn't have time to test or build it
5016for this release. We are including it so that the more adventurous (or
5017masochistic) of you can play with it. We also had major problems with the
5018fact that the compiler that we got from HP doesn't support the -g option.
5019It costs extra.
5020
5021 * New targets supported
5022
5023Hitachi H8/300 h8300-hitachi-hms or h8300hms
5024
5025 * More smarts about finding #include files
5026
5027GDB now remembers the compilation directory for all include files, and for
5028all files from which C is generated (like yacc and lex sources). This
5029greatly improves GDB's ability to find yacc/lex sources, and include files,
5030especially if you are debugging your program from a directory different from
5031the one that contains your sources.
5032
5033We also fixed a bug which caused difficulty with listing and setting
5034breakpoints in include files which contain C code. (In the past, you had to
5035try twice in order to list an include file that you hadn't looked at before.)
5036
5037 * Interesting infernals change
5038
5039GDB now deals with arbitrary numbers of sections, where the symbols for each
5040section must be relocated relative to that section's landing place in the
5041target's address space. This work was needed to support ELF with embedded
5042stabs used by Solaris-2.0.
5043
5044 * Bug fixes (of course!)
5045
5046There have been loads of fixes for the following things:
5047 mips, rs6000, 29k/udi, m68k, g++, type handling, elf/dwarf, m88k,
5048 i960, stabs, DOS(GO32), procfs, etc...
5049
5050See the ChangeLog for details.
5051
5052*** Changes in GDB-4.5:
5053
5054 * New machines supported (host and target)
5055
5056IBM RS6000 running AIX rs6000-ibm-aix or rs6000
5057
5058SGI Irix-4.x mips-sgi-irix4 or iris4
5059
5060 * New malloc package
5061
5062GDB now uses a new memory manager called mmalloc, based on gmalloc.
5063Mmalloc is capable of handling mutiple heaps of memory. It is also
5064capable of saving a heap to a file, and then mapping it back in later.
5065This can be used to greatly speedup the startup of GDB by using a
5066pre-parsed symbol table which lives in a mmalloc managed heap. For
5067more details, please read mmalloc/mmalloc.texi.
5068
5069 * info proc
5070
5071The 'info proc' command (SVR4 only) has been enhanced quite a bit. See
5072'help info proc' for details.
5073
5074 * MIPS ecoff symbol table format
5075
5076The code that reads MIPS symbol table format is now supported on all hosts.
5077Thanks to MIPS for releasing the sym.h and symconst.h files to make this
5078possible.
5079
5080 * File name changes for MS-DOS
5081
5082Many files in the config directories have been renamed to make it easier to
5083support GDB on MS-DOSe systems (which have very restrictive file name
5084conventions :-( ). MS-DOSe host support (under DJ Delorie's GO32
5085environment) is close to working but has some remaining problems. Note
5086that debugging of DOS programs is not supported, due to limitations
5087in the ``operating system'', but it can be used to host cross-debugging.
5088
5089 * Cross byte order fixes
5090
5091Many fixes have been made to support cross debugging of Sparc and MIPS
5092targets from hosts whose byte order differs.
5093
5094 * New -mapped and -readnow options
5095
5096If memory-mapped files are available on your system through the 'mmap'
5097system call, you can use the -mapped option on the `file' or
5098`symbol-file' commands to cause GDB to write the symbols from your
5099program into a reusable file. If the program you are debugging is
5100called `/path/fred', the mapped symbol file will be `./fred.syms'.
5101Future GDB debugging sessions will notice the presence of this file,
5102and will quickly map in symbol information from it, rather than reading
5103the symbol table from the executable program. Using the '-mapped'
5104option in a GDB `file' or `symbol-file' command has the same effect as
5105starting GDB with the '-mapped' command-line option.
5106
5107You can cause GDB to read the entire symbol table immediately by using
5108the '-readnow' option with any of the commands that load symbol table
5109information (or on the GDB command line). This makes the command
5110slower, but makes future operations faster.
5111
5112The -mapped and -readnow options are typically combined in order to
5113build a `fred.syms' file that contains complete symbol information.
5114A simple GDB invocation to do nothing but build a `.syms' file for future
5115use is:
5116
5117 gdb -batch -nx -mapped -readnow programname
5118
5119The `.syms' file is specific to the host machine on which GDB is run.
5120It holds an exact image of GDB's internal symbol table. It cannot be
5121shared across multiple host platforms.
5122
5123 * longjmp() handling
5124
5125GDB is now capable of stepping and nexting over longjmp(), _longjmp(), and
5126siglongjmp() without losing control. This feature has not yet been ported to
5127all systems. It currently works on many 386 platforms, all MIPS-based
5128platforms (SGI, DECstation, etc), and Sun3/4.
5129
5130 * Solaris 2.0
5131
5132Preliminary work has been put in to support the new Solaris OS from Sun. At
5133this time, it can control and debug processes, but it is not capable of
5134reading symbols.
5135
5136 * Bug fixes
5137
5138As always, many many bug fixes. The major areas were with g++, and mipsread.
5139People using the MIPS-based platforms should experience fewer mysterious
5140crashes and trashed symbol tables.
5141
5142*** Changes in GDB-4.4:
5143
5144 * New machines supported (host and target)
5145
5146SCO Unix on i386 IBM PC clones i386-sco-sysv or i386sco
5147 (except core files)
5148BSD Reno on Vax vax-dec-bsd
5149Ultrix on Vax vax-dec-ultrix
5150
5151 * New machines supported (target)
5152
5153AMD 29000 embedded, using EBMON a29k-none-none
5154
5155 * C++ support
5156
5157GDB continues to improve its handling of C++. `References' work better.
5158The demangler has also been improved, and now deals with symbols mangled as
5159per the Annotated C++ Reference Guide.
5160
5161GDB also now handles `stabs' symbol information embedded in MIPS
5162`ecoff' symbol tables. Since the ecoff format was not easily
5163extensible to handle new languages such as C++, this appeared to be a
5164good way to put C++ debugging info into MIPS binaries. This option
5165will be supported in the GNU C compiler, version 2, when it is
5166released.
5167
5168 * New features for SVR4
5169
5170GDB now handles SVR4 shared libraries, in the same fashion as SunOS
5171shared libraries. Debugging dynamically linked programs should present
5172only minor differences from debugging statically linked programs.
5173
5174The `info proc' command will print out information about any process
5175on an SVR4 system (including the one you are debugging). At the moment,
5176it prints the address mappings of the process.
5177
5178If you bring up GDB on another SVR4 system, please send mail to
5179bug-gdb@prep.ai.mit.edu to let us know what changes were reqired (if any).
5180
5181 * Better dynamic linking support in SunOS
5182
5183Reading symbols from shared libraries which contain debugging symbols
5184now works properly. However, there remain issues such as automatic
5185skipping of `transfer vector' code during function calls, which
5186make it harder to debug code in a shared library, than to debug the
5187same code linked statically.
5188
5189 * New Getopt
5190
5191GDB is now using the latest `getopt' routines from the FSF. This
5192version accepts the -- prefix for options with long names. GDB will
5193continue to accept the old forms (-option and +option) as well.
5194Various single letter abbreviations for options have been explicity
5195added to the option table so that they won't get overshadowed in the
5196future by other options that begin with the same letter.
5197
5198 * Bugs fixed
5199
5200The `cleanup_undefined_types' bug that many of you noticed has been squashed.
5201Many assorted bugs have been handled. Many more remain to be handled.
5202See the various ChangeLog files (primarily in gdb and bfd) for details.
5203
5204
5205*** Changes in GDB-4.3:
5206
5207 * New machines supported (host and target)
5208
5209Amiga 3000 running Amix m68k-cbm-svr4 or amix
5210NCR 3000 386 running SVR4 i386-ncr-svr4 or ncr3000
5211Motorola Delta 88000 running Sys V m88k-motorola-sysv or delta88
5212
5213 * Almost SCO Unix support
5214
5215We had hoped to support:
5216SCO Unix on i386 IBM PC clones i386-sco-sysv or i386sco
5217(except for core file support), but we discovered very late in the release
5218that it has problems with process groups that render gdb unusable. Sorry
5219about that. I encourage people to fix it and post the fixes.
5220
5221 * Preliminary ELF and DWARF support
5222
5223GDB can read ELF object files on System V Release 4, and can handle
5224debugging records for C, in DWARF format, in ELF files. This support
5225is preliminary. If you bring up GDB on another SVR4 system, please
5226send mail to bug-gdb@prep.ai.mit.edu to let us know what changes were
5227reqired (if any).
5228
5229 * New Readline
5230
5231GDB now uses the latest `readline' library. One user-visible change
5232is that two tabs will list possible command completions, which previously
5233required typing M-? (meta-question mark, or ESC ?).
5234
5235 * Bugs fixed
5236
5237The `stepi' bug that many of you noticed has been squashed.
5238Many bugs in C++ have been handled. Many more remain to be handled.
5239See the various ChangeLog files (primarily in gdb and bfd) for details.
5240
5241 * State of the MIPS world (in case you wondered):
5242
5243GDB can understand the symbol tables emitted by the compilers
5244supplied by most vendors of MIPS-based machines, including DEC. These
5245symbol tables are in a format that essentially nobody else uses.
5246
5247Some versions of gcc come with an assembler post-processor called
5248mips-tfile. This program is required if you want to do source-level
5249debugging of gcc-compiled programs. I believe FSF does not ship
5250mips-tfile with gcc version 1, but it will eventually come with gcc
5251version 2.
5252
5253Debugging of g++ output remains a problem. g++ version 1.xx does not
5254really support it at all. (If you're lucky, you should be able to get
5255line numbers and stack traces to work, but no parameters or local
5256variables.) With some work it should be possible to improve the
5257situation somewhat.
5258
5259When gcc version 2 is released, you will have somewhat better luck.
5260However, even then you will get confusing results for inheritance and
5261methods.
5262
5263We will eventually provide full debugging of g++ output on
5264DECstations. This will probably involve some kind of stabs-in-ecoff
5265encapulation, but the details have not been worked out yet.
5266
5267
5268*** Changes in GDB-4.2:
5269
5270 * Improved configuration
5271
5272Only one copy of `configure' exists now, and it is not self-modifying.
5273Porting BFD is simpler.
5274
5275 * Stepping improved
5276
5277The `step' and `next' commands now only stop at the first instruction
5278of a source line. This prevents the multiple stops that used to occur
5279in switch statements, for-loops, etc. `Step' continues to stop if a
5280function that has debugging information is called within the line.
5281
5282 * Bug fixing
5283
5284Lots of small bugs fixed. More remain.
5285
5286 * New host supported (not target)
5287
5288Intel 386 PC clone running Mach i386-none-mach
5289
5290
5291*** Changes in GDB-4.1:
5292
5293 * Multiple source language support
5294
5295GDB now has internal scaffolding to handle several source languages.
5296It determines the type of each source file from its filename extension,
5297and will switch expression parsing and number formatting to match the
5298language of the function in the currently selected stack frame.
5299You can also specifically set the language to be used, with
5300`set language c' or `set language modula-2'.
5301
5302 * GDB and Modula-2
5303
5304GDB now has preliminary support for the GNU Modula-2 compiler,
5305currently under development at the State University of New York at
5306Buffalo. Development of both GDB and the GNU Modula-2 compiler will
5307continue through the fall of 1991 and into 1992.
5308
5309Other Modula-2 compilers are currently not supported, and attempting to
5310debug programs compiled with them will likely result in an error as the
5311symbol table is read. Feel free to work on it, though!
5312
5313There are hooks in GDB for strict type checking and range checking,
5314in the `Modula-2 philosophy', but they do not currently work.
5315
5316 * set write on/off
5317
5318GDB can now write to executable and core files (e.g. patch
5319a variable's value). You must turn this switch on, specify
5320the file ("exec foo" or "core foo"), *then* modify it, e.g.
5321by assigning a new value to a variable. Modifications take
5322effect immediately.
5323
5324 * Automatic SunOS shared library reading
5325
5326When you run your program, GDB automatically determines where its
5327shared libraries (if any) have been loaded, and reads their symbols.
5328The `share' command is no longer needed. This also works when
5329examining core files.
5330
5331 * set listsize
5332
5333You can specify the number of lines that the `list' command shows.
5334The default is 10.
5335
5336 * New machines supported (host and target)
5337
5338SGI Iris (MIPS) running Irix V3: mips-sgi-irix or iris
5339Sony NEWS (68K) running NEWSOS 3.x: m68k-sony-sysv or news
5340Ultracomputer (29K) running Sym1: a29k-nyu-sym1 or ultra3
5341
5342 * New hosts supported (not targets)
5343
5344IBM RT/PC: romp-ibm-aix or rtpc
5345
5346 * New targets supported (not hosts)
5347
5348AMD 29000 embedded with COFF a29k-none-coff
5349AMD 29000 embedded with a.out a29k-none-aout
5350Ultracomputer remote kernel debug a29k-nyu-kern
5351
5352 * New remote interfaces
5353
5354AMD 29000 Adapt
5355AMD 29000 Minimon
5356
5357
5358*** Changes in GDB-4.0:
5359
5360 * New Facilities
5361
5362Wide output is wrapped at good places to make the output more readable.
5363
5364Gdb now supports cross-debugging from a host machine of one type to a
5365target machine of another type. Communication with the target system
5366is over serial lines. The ``target'' command handles connecting to the
5367remote system; the ``load'' command will download a program into the
5368remote system. Serial stubs for the m68k and i386 are provided. Gdb
5369also supports debugging of realtime processes running under VxWorks,
5370using SunRPC Remote Procedure Calls over TCP/IP to talk to a debugger
5371stub on the target system.
5372
5373New CPUs supported include the AMD 29000 and Intel 960.
5374
5375GDB now reads object files and symbol tables via a ``binary file''
5376library, which allows a single copy of GDB to debug programs of multiple
5377object file types such as a.out and coff.
5378
5379There is now a GDB reference card in "doc/refcard.tex". (Make targets
5380refcard.dvi and refcard.ps are available to format it).
5381
5382
5383 * Control-Variable user interface simplified
5384
5385All variables that control the operation of the debugger can be set
5386by the ``set'' command, and displayed by the ``show'' command.
5387
5388For example, ``set prompt new-gdb=>'' will change your prompt to new-gdb=>.
5389``Show prompt'' produces the response:
5390Gdb's prompt is new-gdb=>.
5391
5392What follows are the NEW set commands. The command ``help set'' will
5393print a complete list of old and new set commands. ``help set FOO''
5394will give a longer description of the variable FOO. ``show'' will show
5395all of the variable descriptions and their current settings.
5396
5397confirm on/off: Enables warning questions for operations that are
5398 hard to recover from, e.g. rerunning the program while
5399 it is already running. Default is ON.
5400
5401editing on/off: Enables EMACS style command line editing
5402 of input. Previous lines can be recalled with
5403 control-P, the current line can be edited with control-B,
5404 you can search for commands with control-R, etc.
5405 Default is ON.
5406
5407history filename NAME: NAME is where the gdb command history
5408 will be stored. The default is .gdb_history,
5409 or the value of the environment variable
5410 GDBHISTFILE.
5411
5412history size N: The size, in commands, of the command history. The
5413 default is 256, or the value of the environment variable
5414 HISTSIZE.
5415
5416history save on/off: If this value is set to ON, the history file will
5417 be saved after exiting gdb. If set to OFF, the
5418 file will not be saved. The default is OFF.
5419
5420history expansion on/off: If this value is set to ON, then csh-like
5421 history expansion will be performed on
5422 command line input. The default is OFF.
5423
5424radix N: Sets the default radix for input and output. It can be set
5425 to 8, 10, or 16. Note that the argument to "radix" is interpreted
5426 in the current radix, so "set radix 10" is always a no-op.
5427
5428height N: This integer value is the number of lines on a page. Default
5429 is 24, the current `stty rows'' setting, or the ``li#''
5430 setting from the termcap entry matching the environment
5431 variable TERM.
5432
5433width N: This integer value is the number of characters on a line.
5434 Default is 80, the current `stty cols'' setting, or the ``co#''
5435 setting from the termcap entry matching the environment
5436 variable TERM.
5437
5438Note: ``set screensize'' is obsolete. Use ``set height'' and
5439``set width'' instead.
5440
5441print address on/off: Print memory addresses in various command displays,
5442 such as stack traces and structure values. Gdb looks
5443 more ``symbolic'' if you turn this off; it looks more
5444 ``machine level'' with it on. Default is ON.
5445
5446print array on/off: Prettyprint arrays. New convenient format! Default
5447 is OFF.
5448
5449print demangle on/off: Print C++ symbols in "source" form if on,
5450 "raw" form if off.
5451
5452print asm-demangle on/off: Same, for assembler level printouts
5453 like instructions.
5454
5455print vtbl on/off: Prettyprint C++ virtual function tables. Default is OFF.
5456
5457
5458 * Support for Epoch Environment.
5459
5460The epoch environment is a version of Emacs v18 with windowing. One
5461new command, ``inspect'', is identical to ``print'', except that if you
5462are running in the epoch environment, the value is printed in its own
5463window.
5464
5465
5466 * Support for Shared Libraries
5467
5468GDB can now debug programs and core files that use SunOS shared libraries.
5469Symbols from a shared library cannot be referenced
5470before the shared library has been linked with the program (this
5471happens after you type ``run'' and before the function main() is entered).
5472At any time after this linking (including when examining core files
5473from dynamically linked programs), gdb reads the symbols from each
5474shared library when you type the ``sharedlibrary'' command.
5475It can be abbreviated ``share''.
5476
5477sharedlibrary REGEXP: Load shared object library symbols for files
5478 matching a unix regular expression. No argument
5479 indicates to load symbols for all shared libraries.
5480
5481info sharedlibrary: Status of loaded shared libraries.
5482
5483
5484 * Watchpoints
5485
5486A watchpoint stops execution of a program whenever the value of an
5487expression changes. Checking for this slows down execution
5488tremendously whenever you are in the scope of the expression, but is
5489quite useful for catching tough ``bit-spreader'' or pointer misuse
5490problems. Some machines such as the 386 have hardware for doing this
5491more quickly, and future versions of gdb will use this hardware.
5492
5493watch EXP: Set a watchpoint (breakpoint) for an expression.
5494
5495info watchpoints: Information about your watchpoints.
5496
5497delete N: Deletes watchpoint number N (same as breakpoints).
5498disable N: Temporarily turns off watchpoint number N (same as breakpoints).
5499enable N: Re-enables watchpoint number N (same as breakpoints).
5500
5501
5502 * C++ multiple inheritance
5503
5504When used with a GCC version 2 compiler, GDB supports multiple inheritance
5505for C++ programs.
5506
5507 * C++ exception handling
5508
5509Gdb now supports limited C++ exception handling. Besides the existing
5510ability to breakpoint on an exception handler, gdb can breakpoint on
5511the raising of an exception (before the stack is peeled back to the
5512handler's context).
5513
5514catch FOO: If there is a FOO exception handler in the dynamic scope,
5515 set a breakpoint to catch exceptions which may be raised there.
5516 Multiple exceptions (``catch foo bar baz'') may be caught.
5517
5518info catch: Lists all exceptions which may be caught in the
5519 current stack frame.
5520
5521
5522 * Minor command changes
5523
5524The command ``call func (arg, arg, ...)'' now acts like the print
5525command, except it does not print or save a value if the function's result
5526is void. This is similar to dbx usage.
5527
5528The ``up'' and ``down'' commands now always print the frame they end up
5529at; ``up-silently'' and `down-silently'' can be used in scripts to change
5530frames without printing.
5531
5532 * New directory command
5533
5534'dir' now adds directories to the FRONT of the source search path.
5535The path starts off empty. Source files that contain debug information
5536about the directory in which they were compiled can be found even
5537with an empty path; Sun CC and GCC include this information. If GDB can't
5538find your source file in the current directory, type "dir .".
5539
5540 * Configuring GDB for compilation
5541
5542For normal use, type ``./configure host''. See README or gdb.texinfo
5543for more details.
5544
5545GDB now handles cross debugging. If you are remotely debugging between
5546two different machines, type ``./configure host -target=targ''.
5547Host is the machine where GDB will run; targ is the machine
5548where the program that you are debugging will run.
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