I am running gdb 10.1.90.20210103-git and gcc/g++ 10.2.1 20210110 on x86-64 Debian 11. My IDE is Codelite, which uses the manual rather than the machine interface to gdb, and enables me to type commands directly to gdb, and see the response (potentially copying the response to the clipboard). This when the inferior is paused after hitting a breakpoiunt, via the gdb console, which is in Codelite's Debugger > Output pane.
I was able to use the instructions at: https://sourceware.org/gdb/current/onlinedocs/gdb#Compiling-and-Injecting-Code "Compiling and injecting code in GDB" to compile simple C code and make it run in the environment of the halted inferior. For instance: compile code blah++; increments a local variable int in the inferior, which I can see via the Locals or Watch panes.
The compile file command worked fine as long as I specified the absolute path of the source file.
I was unable to see console output (to the inferior's or gdb's console) for a simple printf() statement: `printf("xxx");' because the code would not compile if there was such a line
Despite using set debug compile and set debug compile-cplus-types and checking these are set with the show versions of these, I get no error messages or acknowledgements regarding whatever I try to compile.
The blah variable is an integer, which is accessible through C code and so gcc. The ability to increment this was the only indication that my code had compiled and run.
I could not get any responses to set/show compile gcc so I am presumably compiling with gcc. I did give the command set compile gcc /usr/bin/x86_64-linux-gnu-cpp-10, but there was still no response from show compile gcc or any change in the C-only behaviour.
I could not compile the file if it contained a C++ line which incremented a data member of a class object in an vector of such objects. Nor could I compile my code if it contained C++ code such as: #include <fstream> and/or std::fstream oFile;.
The gdb documentation mentioned above is general, but does have C examples.
Is it possible to compile C++ code under gdb, injecting it into the environment of the paused inferior, with any version of gdb and gcc?
I am keen to use this C++ code injection facility, if it exists, for dumping the contents of large, complex, data structures to files and and to modify some elements of same to aid debugging.
Summary: GDB's C++ compilation and injection system does not work for me, and it is reported to be buggy or non-functional. I only tested this compile command with single lines of C code, but it worked fine for these. I was able to run my function, which writes a text dump file containing the values of a vector of class objects' data members, while the inferior was paused after a breakpoint, by including it in a source file and calling it with GDB's print or call commands, giving it the required input argument of the name of the vector to dump.
I haven't tried using GDB on its own, but at present I have no reason to believe that Codelite is interfering with my ability to communicate with GDB via Codelite's "Debugger > Output" console.
I wrote to the GDB Developer list and received what I assume is a well informed reply. I was told that in my respondent's experience "the C++ plugin isn't very functional. It seems to have some bugs and crash pretty frequently as well. Also, it seems like nobody is actively working on it." This is consistent with my experience to date.
Perhaps later versions of GDB would work better. However, there has been minimal change to the library https://github.com/gcc-mirror/gcc/commits/master/libcc1/libcp1.cc since 2017, and I could find no indication of new work on C++ compilation and injection in https://www.sourceware.org/gdb/news/ since the announcement of its introduction:
GDB 8.3.1 was released on 2019-09-20, with: "Experimental support for compilation and injection of C++ source code into the inferior (requires GCC 7.1 or higher, built with libcp1.so)."
It is possible that my problem is related to not having this library. I do have the C equivalent: /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libcc1.so.o. I could find no such library in a Debian package. It is possible I could get this going by compiling the latest GCC/G++ and GDB, but that is pretty daunting, involving installing later standard libraries than my current Debian installation has, while making those and the newer G++ and GDB available for Codelite sessions, but not interfering with other software on machine which needs the older compilation system.
The respondent suggested that instead of compiling and injecting fresh code in the middle of a debugging session, I could write it as a library, and run it by using the compile command, on a purely C piece of code which would call it. However, for my purposes, the function needs to be passed one or more C++ constructs, and any code which called a C++ function would be C++ code and so, presumably, not be compiled by GDB.
For my immediate purpose of doing text dumps of large vectors of class objects' data members, I was able to succeed by writing such a function in an existing source file, which also contains the functions I am debugging. Then I could call it with GDB's print or call commands. I imagine this would work if the debugging function was in any other linked source file, or in a linked library. (Perhaps there is a way of writing such a library, compiling and linking it while the inferior is halted.)
I was able to run this, from a debugging session in which the inferior was halted somewhere, with either the print or call command followed by the name of the function, with the name of the vector in brackets. There must be no semicolon. I found the print command better, since GDB would report the return value, which was "void". My function used C++ constructs such as "<<" to write to the text file.
A call within my dump function of the C function system("pwd") resulted in the current directory being output on the inferior's terminal window. Likewise: print system("pwd"). print system("mc") dutifully ran Midnight Commander in the inferior's terminal window.
I altered the function to return a string, which GDB reported in the GDB "Debugger > Output" console. I added a line: std::cout << "xyz"; - but nothing appeared on either the inferior's terminal window or in the GDB console.
My attempts to use the compile command to call my dump function in exactly the same way produced no results, with or without a trailing semicolon.
I found thatprint and call work with C and C++ code while `compile" only works with C code.
I tried print vvv[6].mmm for data members which were integers, floats, and strings and GDB returned their values correctly. Adding a ++ at the end caused it to return the original integer value, but the value itself was incremented.
When I tried print with a compound line of code, with a semicolon between the two logical lines, with and without one at the end, there was no response.
The GDB Developers list is not the place for support requests, but I did not know a better way to find out about the status of this facility.
Related
I am using vim for c++ programming. I have bound the compile command to ctrl+c in vim and I run it in another tmux pane by running ./main.out. My problem is that when my c++ program gives me segmentation fault error, I don't know which line has caused the problem. But when I compiled and ran the program in vscode, it showed me the line that caused the error.
I'm seeking for a way to find out the lines that cause runtime errors like segmentation fault error while running the program's binary file in console.
This is an example output when I do ./main.out:
[1] 24656 segmentation fault (core dumped) ./main.out
When compiling the program, add the -g compiler flag, or even better -ggdb3, which will give you a much prettier output, by adding debugging symbols to the executable. Also, make sure that you compile with the -O0 optimization level.
To actually debug the program, run gdb ./main.out to start the program in a debugging session. If you then run r, gdb will start executing the program, and then stop at the line that gives the segfault.
To figure out how you got to that point, run bt while in the debugging session, and you will get a backtrace, which will show you all the function calls that were made to get to the line of code that crashed.
You can of course do a lot more than this (and you will probably need to, since locating the source of an error is often only the first step). You can use p to print the values of variables, set watchpoints, and many more things. For a while now, gdb even ships with a full fledged python interpreter, so you can even write a python script for your custom debugging needs.
Learning how to use gdb can seem overwhelming at the start, but persevere, and I guarantee the effort will pay off big time :)
Ditto on Adin
Also your code can crash due to a call in which the parameter/s are acceptable but cause the proverbial out of range protection fault from some library somewhere if you don't have those debug versions. If an assembly routine is used inside there, they can do some strange things.
So don't be afraid to add temporary code to help like finding a single call that crashes when 1,000,000 other calls to the same did not.
Is why I like to use a lot of generated randoms if possible to test when you got it fixed.
I am new to Linux space.
My project creates 'so' (akin to our dll's) which is used by an executable.
Currently to debug, I invoke gdb -tui Which puts me into the gdb terminal where I put break points and do the r with parameters ... and debug.
Everything was fine, until now where the entire architecture has been changed.
Now to run our code, we execute a command
$ java -jar ... and a lot many parameters.
The jar files etc do not belong to us.
I am yet to find out what executable is called, or the code flow.
Question :
Is there a way to invoke gdb command from within my source code ?
say
MyClass::myFunc()
{
some calls
<THE GDB COMMAND>
What I am looking at is, once I place my 'so' in the path and execute the said java command, the gdb is invoked the moment it hits my function.
The solution provided here wasn't clear.
Invoke and control GDB from c++
I have a gdb backtrace of a crashed process, but I can't see the specific line in which the crash occurred because the source code was not in that moment. I don't understand some of the information given by the mentioned backtrace.
The backtrace is made of lines like the following one:
<path_to_binary_file>(_Z12someFunction+0x18)[0x804a378]
Notice that _Z12someFunction is the mangled name of int someFunction(double ).
My questions are:
Does the +0x18 indicate the offset, starting at _Z12someFunction address, of the assembly instruction that produced the crash?
If the previous question is affirmative, and taking into account that I am working with a 32-bit architecture, does the +0x18 indicates 0x18 * 4 bytes?
If the above is affirmative, I assume that the address 0x804a378 is the _Z12someFunction plus 0x18, am I right?
EDIT:
The error has ocurred in a production machine (no cores enabled), and it seems to be a timing-dependant bug, so it is not easy to reproduce it. That is because the information I am asking for is important to me in this occasion.
Most of your assumptions are correct. The +0x18 indeed means offset (in bytes, regardless of architecture) into the executable.
0x804a378 is the actual address in which the error occurred.
With that said, it is important to understand what you can do about it.
First of all, compiling with -g will produce debug symbols. You, rightfully, strip those for your production build, but all is not lost. If you take your original executable (i.e. - before you striped it), you can run:
addr2line -e executable
You can then feed into stdin the addresses gdb is giving you (0x804a378), and addr2line will give you the precise file and line to which this address refers.
If you have a core file, you can also load this core file with the unstriped executable, and get full debug info. It would still be somewhat mangled, as you're probably building with optimizations, but some variables should, still, be accessible.
Building with debug symbols and stripping before shipping is the best option. Even if you did not, however, if you build the same sources again with the same build tools on the same environment and using the same build options, you should get the same binary with the same symbols locations. If the bug is really difficult to reproduce, it might be worthwhile to try.
EDITED to add
Two more important tools are c++filt. You feed it a mangled symbol, and produces the C++ path to the actual source symbol. It works as a filter, so you can just copy the backtrace and paste it into c++filt, and it will give you the same backtrace, only more readable.
The second tool is gdb remote debugging. This allows you to run gdb on a machine that has the executable with debug symbols, but run the actual code on the production machine. This allows live debugging in production (including attaching to already running processes).
You are confused. What you are seeing is backtrace output from glibc's backtrace function, not gdb's backtrace.
but I can't see the specific line in which the crash occurred because
the source code was not in that moment
Now you can load executable in gdb and examine the address 0x804a378 to get line numbers. You can use list *0x804a378 or info symbol 0x804a378. See Convert a libc backtrace to a source line number and How to use addr2line command in linux.
Run man gcc, there you should see -g option that gives you possibility to add debug information to the binary object file, so when crash happens and the core is dumped gdb can detect exact lines where and why the crash happened, or you can run the process using gdb or attach to it and see the trace directly without searching for the core file.
I recently installed ldc through hombrew on my Mac and was testing out running a code as a script from the D wiki when I noticed that using ldmd2 to compile my program doesn't also run my program after. Whats the difference then since this is the same behavior as running ldc2.
Heres my program
import std.stdio;
void main()
{
writeln("Hello, world without explicit compilations!");
}
EDIT:
The website states "For small projects it's handy to compile and run in a single step. Most (if not all) compiler packages, contain a tool named rdmd/gdmd/ldmd or similar. For instructional purposes we'll call it rdmd." What im taking from this is it depends on which compiler your using but in the case of ldc I should be using ldmd.
ldmd2 is just a wrapper script for ldc2 which converts argument formats from dmd style over to ldc style.
So it does exactly the same thing, just some options and flags on the compile command line have different names and stuff like that.
The link is talking about rdmd which is a separate program that recursively grabs dependencies, compiles, and automatically runs. rdmd works on top of the compiler and might have been packaged with it or might need to be downloaded separately.
Its source lives here: https://github.com/D-Programming-Language/tools/blob/master/rdmd.d
and it is compatible with ldmd2's option formats.
I have a C++ project that was built and runs in Visual Studio.
When I try to run it in unix, it gives me
Abort (Core Dumped)
I am using the g++ version 3.2.2
How do i Fix this program ? It needs to run in linux.
First step is to learn how to use gdb or any of the other excellent debuggers for Linux.
That should be able to tell you exactly which source line caused the problem. Then work back from there.
Other than that, we can't really help without seeing that source code. Psychic debugging, whilst useful, is not a highly developed field of endeavour :-)
#All
Thanks a lot for your responses.I really appreciate it
My program worked with g++ 4.2.3. It was aborting with g++ 3.2.2.
The code that gave me the correct output in visual studio was
foundOpen = inStr.find("(");
foundClose = inStr.find(")");
string inGate;
inGate = inStr.substr(++foundOpen,foundClose-foundOpen);
But using g++, I had to make a small change to the substr function.
foundOpen = inStr.find("(");
foundClose = inStr.find(")");
string inGate;
inGate = inStr.substr(++foundOpen,foundClose-foundOpen-1);
I am also a beginner to using linux and don't know how to use gdb. Are there any good tutorials to learn gdb?
I'll take a flying guess: your program uses 'getch()' and you found the function in the library -lcurses or -lncurses and are using that library, but your program crashes as you said.
The trouble is, that function requires a certain amount of setup to work - unlike the similarly named but rather different function that is available on Windows.
Welcome to the real world - different platforms have different functions in the standard APIs; sometimes, two platforms have a function with the same name but different meanings.
Another wild guess: boolean initialization, we got bit by this one. The boolean was initialized automatically using VC++2003 but on Linux it was not (thus either true or false, flip a coin...).
Took a while to debug since in our case it did not crash and was intermittent. I wanted to slap the programmer on the head for not initializing his variable!