Contents
List of requirements for patches
The file <gdb-src>/gdb/CONTRIBUTE contains instructions on what is expected from patches submitted to GDB. Please read through that document, and pay special attention to the Coding Standard and ChangeLog requirements.
GDB Internals documentation
GDB has an official Internals Manual (see the documentation page). It is a good reference guide for GDB, but some parts are incomplete or outdated.
Jeremy Bennett wrote Howto: Porting the GNU Debugger, which is a good source of information as well. It is primarily aimed at engineers who will port GDB to a new target for the first time, but contains an overview of GDB Internals that is of general interest.
Creating ChangeLog entries
The mklog script creates a ChangeLog template for a diff file. This version was written by Diego Novillo and updated by Daniel Jacobowitz. Run "mklog diff-file" and the template will be added to the top of the file.
Editing configure.ac
After editing gdb/configure.ac, you need to regenerate gdb/configure, gdb/config.in and gdb/aclocal.m4:
$ pwd /path/to/src/gdb $ aclocal -I gnulib/m4 $ autoconf $ autoheader
Please note:
You need to use the correct versions of aclocal, autoconf and autoheader. The correct version is the one mentioned at the beginning of gdb/aclocal.m4 and gdb/configure.
- Don't include the changes to these generated files in your patch when you post it to the mailing list. These files are big and unnecessary for code review.
Patch Tracker
gdb has a patch tracker. Read here for instructions on how to use it.
Debugging gdbserver on Linux
GDB has issues with breakpoints set in gdbserver. Ulrich Weigand has a tip to make it work:
Gdbserver uses a direct call to the Linux "clone" system call at startup, and for some reason GDB gets really confused by this. When I want to debug gdbserver, I generally simply comment out the call to linux_test_for_tracefork in linux-nat.c:initialize_low to avoid this.
Writing testcases
See GDBTestcaseCookbook.
Finding Gnats bug entries in the Bugzilla database
If you ever had to find an old bug in the Bugzilla database, you probably stumbled upon this situation. There are some old entries from the now-retired Gnats database, which can be found by:
Adding 7105 to the Gnats bug number;
Search for "Converted from Gnats NNN", where NNN is the Gnats bug number.
Use "gdb 123" Location with Mozilla bookmark keyword "gdb", URL "http://localhost/~user/cgi-bin/buggdb.php?id=%s" and install this file as "~/public_html/cgi-bin/buggdb.php".