What is 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.

GDB can do four main kinds of things (plus other things in support of these) to help you catch bugs in the act:

• Start your program, specifying anything that might affect its behavior.
• Make your program stop on specified conditions.
• Examine what has happened, when your program has stopped.
• Change things in your program, so you can experiment with correcting the effects of one bug and go on to learn about another.

What Languages does GDB Support?

• Ada
• Assembly
• C
• C++
• D
• Fortran
• Go
• Objective-C
• OpenCL
• Modula-2
• Pascal
• Rust

GDB version 8.1.1

An errata list (PROBLEMS) and documentation are also available.

News

July 31st, 2018: GDB 8.1.1 Released!

The latest version of GDB, version 8.1.1, is available for download.

This is a minor corrective release over GDB 8.1, fixing the following issues:

• PR gdb/22824 (misleading description of new rbreak Python function in GDB 8.1 NEWS file)
• PR gdb/22849 (ctrl-c doesn't work in extended-remote)
• PR gdb/22907 ([Regression] gdbserver doesn't work with filename-only binaries)
• PR gdb/23028 (inconsistent disassemble of vcvtpd2dq)
• PR gdb/23053 (Fix -D_GLIBCXX_DEBUG gdb-add-index regression)
• PR gdb/23127 ([AArch64] GDB cannot be used for debugging software that uses high Virtual Addresses)
• PR server/23158 (gdbserver no longer functional on Windows)
• PR breakpoints/23210 ([8.1/8.2 Regression] Bogus Breakpoint address adjusted from 0xf7fe7dd3 to 0xfffffffff7fe7dd3)

July 4th, 2018: GDB 8.2 branch created

The GDB 8.2 branch (gdb-8.2-branch) has been created. To check out a copy of the branch use:

git clone --branch gdb-8.2-branch ssh://sourceware.org/git/binutils-gdb.git

January 31st, 2018: GDB 8.1 Released!

The latest version of GDB, version 8.1, is available for download.

Changes in this release include:

• Breakpoints on C++ functions are now set on all scopes by default ("wild" matching);
• Support for inserting breakpoints on functions marked with C++ ABI tags;
• Target floating-point arithmetic emulation during expression evaluation (requires MPFR 3.1 or later);
• Various Python Scripting enhancements;
• Improved Rust support; in particular, Trait objects can now be inspected when debugging Rust code;
• GDB no longer makes assumptions about the type of symbols without debugging information to avoid producing erroneous and often confusing results;
• The 'enable' and 'disable' commands now accept a range of breakpoint locations;
• New 'starti' command to start the program at the first instruction;
• New 'rbreak' command to insert a number of breakpoints via a regular expression pattern (requires Python);
• The 'ptype' command now supports printing the offset and size of the fields in a struct;
• The 'gcore' command now supports dumping all the memory mappings ('-a' command-line option);
• New shortcuts for TUI Single-Key mode: 'i' for stepi, and 'o' for nexti;
• GDBserver enhancements:
  • Support for transmitting environment variables to GDBserver;
  • Support for starting inferior processes with a specified initial working directory;
  • On Unix systems, support for globbing expansion and variable substitution of inferior command-line arguments;
• Various completion enhancements;
• The command used to compile and inject code with the 'compile' command is now configurable;
• New '--readnever' command-line option to speed the GDB startup when debugging information is not needed;
• Support for the following new native configurations:
  • FreeBSD/aarch64 (aarch64*-*-freebsd*);
  • FreeBSD/arm (arm*-*-freebsd*);
• Support for the following new targets:
  • FreeBSD/aarch64 (aarch64*-*-freebsd*);
  • FreeBSD/arm (arm*-*-freebsd*);
  • OpenRISC ELF (or1k*-*-elf)
• Removed support for the following targets and native configurations:
  • Solaris2/x86 (i?86-*-solaris2.[0-9]);
  • Solaris2/sparc (sparc*-*-solaris2.[0-9]);

See the NEWS file for a more complete and detailed list of what this release includes.

September 30, 2011: Release Mistakes in GDB Versions 6.0 - 7.3

A mistake has been detected in the release tar files for all GDB releases from version 6.0 to version 7.3 (included). The mistake has been corrected, and the FSF issued the following announcements:

• Making up for a release mistake in GDB versions 6.0 - 6.6
• Making up for a release mistake in GDB versions 6.7 - 7.3

Nov 28, 2006: Reversible Debugging

The GDB maintainers are looking for contributors interested in reversible debugging.