GDB: An Open Source Debugger for Embedded Development

How to Learn More

This presentation offers an entre into the usage and workings of the GNU debugger. Fortunately, there are a number of sources for further study.

The would-be learner should start with the GDB manual "Debugging with GDB", by Richard Stallman and Roland Pesch. The manual has quite a few interesting tidbits; I still come across things that I didn't know before. It is available in bookstores, (ISBN 1-882114-09-4), and also online as web pages.

The "GDB Internals" manual is also useful, although still sketchy on many subjects. It includes a basic description of the target architecture definition macros.

Then there is the source code. It is not the ideal of code, but there are quite a few comments in it, both for the theory and practice of how it's supposed to work.

The main GDB web page is at http://sourceware.cygnus.com/gdb. This page also includes links to information about GUIs for GDB, such as DDD, as well as links to the downloadable sources.

There are a number of mailing lists discussing GDB. gdb@cygnus.com is for general discussion of GDB. The gdb-patches@cygnus.com list is for submission of patches to GDB; oftentimes you can monitor this to see what new things are being added. gdb-announce@cygnus.com is a low-traffic list for announcements, while gdb-testers@cygnus.com is mainly used during the GDB release process to announce snapshots and report test results.