The debugging of the debugger gdb 16.1 was presented, marking the first release of the 16.x series, with development done on branch 16.0. GDB offers debugging support at the level of source texts for a wide range of programming languages, such as ADA, C, C++, D, Fortran, Go, Objective-C, Modula-2, Pascal, Rust, among others. It supports various hardware platforms like i386, AMD64, ARM, Power, SparC, RISC-V, LOONGARCH, and software platforms including GNU/Linux, *BSD, UNIX, Windows, and MacOS.
The latest improvements include:
- For systems running Linux on Loongarch architecture, support for recording and re-execution (Record/Replay) has been implemented.
- Support for taggy pointers, where part of the bits store additional data, has been added with stop points that function when data changes (Watchpoint).
- For systems with Aarch64 architecture, debugging support for the memory tagging extension (MTE) protection mechanism has been added. MTE allows tagging memory areas to check proper use of pointers and prevent vulnerabilities due to incorrect memory handling.
- A bash script GSTACK has been introduced, utilizing GDB to trace stack operations for processes.
- When creating a stop point, keywords ‘Thread’ and ‘Task’ are now examined for dot stopping, instead of after exiting the waiting state.
- Ensures replacement of stops tied to threads only in the program area where the necessary thread is executing.
/Reports, release notes, official announcements.