GDB 7!

I wasn’t prepared for this. After spending months playing with GDB development trees I somehow entirely missed that 7.0 release is getting close, and took me more than an hour to spot it.

My favorite features are python scripting and non-stop debugging. I was toying around with python scripting for a while, and was planning to make backtraces make sense. Having hands that open means that one can see PHP backtraces, when gdb’ing apache, see table names and states when MySQL thread access handler interfaces, or remote IPs and users, when it is writing to network. Process inspection can simply rock, if right tools are created using these new capabilities, and I’m way too excited when I think about those. “Always have debugging symbols” gets way more meaning now.

Another issue I’ve been trying to resolve lately is avoiding long locking periods for running processes (directly attaching to process can freeze its work for a second or so, which isn’t that tolerable in production environments). GDB is getting closer to the async debugging capabilities – where one can run a debugger without actually stopping anything.

So, congratulations GDB team, now it is job for us to find all the uses of the tool. It has been invaluable so far, but this is much much more.