gdb automatically steps into inline functions - c++

Question

I'm debugging a running program with gdb 6.6 on solaris, and noticed that sometimes gdb steps into (inline) functions, even though I issued a next command.
My development host was recently reinstalled with a slightly newer build of solaris 10, and I know for sure the auto-stepping was not present before the host was reinstalled. The code is compiled with the same options since the makefiles and all the source code is unchanged since host reinstallation.
Is there any setting/new default option which influences gdb's debugging behaviour that I can check? Does anyone know why my gdb now auto-steps? Its a pain really ...
[edit] to clarify: I did not mean the inline keyword, but rather methods/functions which are implemented in the header file. Example:
header.hpp:
class MyClass
{
public:
void someFunc() { ... does something }
}
source.cc:
{
MyClass instance;
instance.someFunc(); // doing NEXT in gdb will actually STEP into header.hpp
}

Answer 1

Your new version of Solaris may have included a new version of the C or C++ compiler. The new compiler may be optimizing more aggressively than it did before. Check your optimization flags. If you are using GCC, you can disable inlining with -fno-inline (note that methods that are implemented in the class in header files are inlined by default which can be disabled with -fno-default-inline). If you are using the native Solaris compiler, you will need to check its documentation.
A similar problem was reported here. In the comment, the poster mentioned changing the debug symbol to use STABS resolved the issue.
You mentioned in a comment to my answer that STABS works, but is not acceptable. Also, you mentioned that you are unable to reproduce the issue with a simple example. It will be difficult to trouble shoot this issue if you have to recompile your entire project each time to perform a test. Try to isolate the problem to a few source files in your project. See what they have in common (do they include a common header file, do they use a pragma, are the compilation options a little different from the other source fies, etc.), and try to create a small example with the same problem. This will make it easier to identify the root cause of your issue and determine how to resolve it. Without this data, we are just the blind leading the blind.