Introduction to GDB
GDB, the GNU Project debugger, allows you to see what is going on “inside” another program while it executes -- or what another program was doing at the moment it crashed. Note that GDB is most effective when tracing programs and libraries that were built with debugging symbols and not stripped.
Note
Development versions of BLFS may not build or run some packages properly if LFS or dependencies have been updated since the most recent stable versions of the books.
Package Information
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Download (HTTP): https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/gdb/gdb-14.1.tar.xz
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Download MD5 sum: 4a084d03915b271f67e9b8ea2ab24972
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Download size: 23 MB
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Estimated disk space required: 966 MB (add 805 MB for docs; add 710 MB for tests)
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Estimated build time: 2.1 SBU (add 0.4 SBU for docs; add 18 SBU for tests; all using parallelism=4)
GDB Dependencies
Recommended Runtime Dependency
six-1.16.0 (Python 3 module, required at run-time to use GDB scripts from various LFS/BLFS packages with Python 3 installed in LFS)
Optional
Doxygen-1.10.0, GCC-13.2.0 (ada, gfortran, and go are used for tests), Guile-3.0.9, rustc-1.75.0 (used for some tests), Valgrind-3.22.0, and SystemTap (run-time, used for tests)
Installation of GDB
Install GDB by running the following commands:
mkdir build &&
cd build &&
../configure --prefix=/usr \
--with-system-readline \
--with-python=/usr/bin/python3 &&
make
Optionally, to build the API documentation using Doxygen-1.10.0, run:
make -C gdb/doc doxy
To test the results, issue:
pushd gdb/testsuite &&
make site.exp &&
echo "set gdb_test_timeout 120" >> site.exp &&
runtest
popd
See gdb/testsuite/README and TestingGDB. There are many problems with the test suite:
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Clean directories are needed if re-running the tests. For that reason, make a copy of the compiled source code directory before the tests in case you need to run the tests again.
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Results depend on installed compilers.
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A test run of the test suite had 51 unexpected failures out of the over 106000 tests.
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On some systems, the gdb.tui test suite will fail if running over SSH.
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On some AMD-based systems, over 200 additional tests may fail due to a difference in the threading implementation on those CPUs.
Now, as the root
user:
make -C gdb install &&
make -C gdbserver install
If you have built the API documentation, it is now in gdb/doc/doxy. You can install it (as the root
user):
install -d /usr/share/doc/gdb-14.1 &&
rm -rf gdb/doc/doxy/xml &&
cp -Rv gdb/doc/doxy /usr/share/doc/gdb-14.1
Command Explanations
--with-system-readline
: This switch forces GDB to use the copy of Readline installed in LFS.
--with-python=/usr/bin/python3
: This switch forces GDB to use Python 3.