Internals - GDB Wiki

The following pages derive from the old GDB Internals Manual.

As the texinfo form of the manual is now retired, you may edit these pages freely.

Structured listing

These are the automagically generated pages, structured (approximately) to match the old Internals manual structure. There are a few missing pages added to preserve the structure. This is a starting point for an improved structure!

Summary
- Requirements
- Contributors
Overall structure
- The symbol side
- The target side
- Configurations
- Source tree structure
Algorithms
- Prologue analysis
- Breakpoint handling
- Single stepping
- Stepping over runtime loader dynamic symbol resolution code
- Signal handling
- Thread handling
- Inferior function calls
- longjmp support
- Watchpoints
- Checkpoints
- Observing changes in GDB internals
User interface
- Command interpreter
- UI-independent output: the ui_out functions
- Console printing
- TUI
- CLI support
Values
Stack frames
Symbol handling
- Symbol reading
- Partial symbol tables
- Types
- Object file formats
- Debugging file formats
- Adding a new symbol reader to GDB
- Memory management for symbol files
Language support
- Adding a source language to GDB
Host definition
- Adding a new host
- Host conditionals
Target architecture definition
- Os abi variant handling
- Initialize new architecture
- Registers and memory
- Pointers and addresses
- Address classes
- Register representation
- Frame interpretation
- Inferior call setup
  - About dummy frames
  - Functions creating dummy frames
- Adding support for debugging core files
- Defining other architecture features
- Adding a new target
Target descriptions
- Target descriptions implementation
- Adding target described register support
Target vector definition
- Managing execution state
- Existing targets
Native debugging
- Shared libraries
- Native conditionals
Support libraries
- Bfd
- opcodes
- readline
- libiberty
- gnu-regex
- Array containers
- include
Coding standards
- GDB C++ coding standards
- GDB Python coding standards
- GDB Testsuite coding standards
Miscellaneous guidelines
- Cleanups
- Per-architecture module data
- Wrapping output lines
- Memory management
- Compiler warnings
- Build with different compilers
- Internal error recovery
- Command names
- Clean design and portable implementation
- GDB's use of tables of functions as a pseudo-vtable
Porting gdb
- Adding Simulator support
Versions and branches
- Versions
- Release branches
- Vendor branches
- Experimental branches
Start of new year procedure
Releasing gdb
- Obsoleting code
- Before the branch
- Cut the branch
- Stabilize the branch
- Create a release
Testsuite
- Using the testsuite
- Testsuite parameters
- Testsuite configuration
- Testsuite organization
- Writing tests
- Board settings
Hints
- Getting started
- Debugging GDB with itself
- Submitting patches
- Build script
- Running GDB from the build directory
GDB observers

Alphabetical listing

(Note that the initial listing is in alphabetical order by section title, not the original order in the manual; feel free to replace with an improved layout.)