Chapter 19: Debugging with GDB
Bugs happen. Identifying and fixing them is part of the development process. There are many different techniques for finding and characterizing program defects, including static and dynamic analysis, code review, tracing, profiling, and interactive debugging. I will look at tracers and profilers in the next chapter, but here I want to concentrate on the traditional approach of watching code execution through a debugger, which in our case is the GNU Project Debugger (GDB). GDB is a powerful and flexible tool. You can use it to debug applications, examine the postmortem files (core files) that are created after a program crash, and even step through kernel code.
In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:
- The GNU debugger
- Preparing to debug
- Debugging applications
- Just-in-time debugging
- Debugging forks and threads
- Core files
- GDB user interfaces
- Debugging kernel code
