GDB 6.8 COFF Compatibility

[mesheets]

GDB 6.8 COFF Compatibility Issues Compared to GDB 5.3

• Slower
  • Longer to initialize a debug session
  • Longer to step through while debugging
• “Next” (Step Over) does not work
  • Difficulty detecting method boundaries (start/end) in COFF files
  • Disabling optimizations could help (e.g., -O0 instead of -Os), but that doesn't work well for space-constrained devices
• Debug Formats
  • Support oriented towards DWARF-2 at the expense of older formats
  • DWARF-2 only supported for i[34567]86-*-nto-qnx* and *-*-solaris2.[789] | *-*-solaris2.1[0-9] targets in GCC 3.4.6 (c.f. config.gcc)
  • DWARF-1 support removed with the GDB 6.7 release
• More rigid, less flexible implementations
  • GDB debug protocol
  • Debug format support
    • Elimination of prior lazy loading
    • Loss of source alignment granularity

GDB 6 Release Notes History

Version	Date
GDB 6.0	Mon., Oct. 6, 2003
GDB 6.1	Sat., Apr. 17, 2004
GDB 6.2	Fri., Jul. 30, 2004
– 6.2.1	Wed., Sep. 8, 2004
GDB 6.3	Fri., Nov. 12, 2004
GDB 6.4	Fri., Dec. 2, 2005
– 6.4 Release Plan	Wed., Feb. 9, 2005
– Errata: Erroneously listed removals:       h8300, mn10300, v850	Thu., Dec. 8, 2005
GDB 6.5	Wed., Jun. 21, 2006
GDB 6.6	Mon., Dec. 18, 2006
GDB 6.7	Wed., Oct. 10, 2007
– 6.7.1	Mon., Oct. 29, 2007
GDB 6.8	Thu., Mar. 27, 2008
– 6.8-1 w/GUI “Insight” Debugger	Sun,. Apr. 6 2008

GDB high-level release history and timeline