Just-in-time debugging

Sometimes a program will start to misbehave after it has been running for a while, and you would like to know what it is doing. The GDB attach feature does exactly this. I call it just-in-time debugging. It is available with both native and remote debug sessions.

In the case of remote debugging, you need to find the PID of the process to be debugged and pass it to gdbserver with the --attach option. For example, if the PID is 109, you would type this:

# gdbserver --attach :10000 109
Attached; pid = 109
Listening on port 10000

This forces the process to stop as if it were at a breakpoint, allowing you to start your cross GDB in the normal way and connect to gdbserver. When you are done, you can detach, allowing the program to continue running without the debugger:

(gdb) detach
Detaching from program: /home/chris/MELP/helloworld/helloworld, process 109
Ending...