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GDB

Description

gdb website

GDB, the GNU Project debugger, allows you to see what is going on `inside' another program while it executes -- or what another program was doing at the moment it crashed.

GDB can do four main kinds of things (plus other things in support of these) to help you catch bugs in the act:

  • Start your program, specifying anything that might affect its behavior. * Make your program stop on specified conditions. * Examine what has happened, when your program has stopped. * Change things in your program, so you can experiment with correcting the effects of one bug and go on to learn about another.

Environment Modules

Run module spider gdb to find out what environment modules are available for this application.

Environment Variables

  • HPC_GDB_DIR - installation directory
  • HPC_GDB_BIN - executable directory

Additional Usage Information

Pretty Printing

See the Pretty Printing Website for more detailed information.

Pretty printers are provided by the compiler module (i.e. gcc/9.3.0), so you will need to load the GCC module and customize your ~/.gdbinit file:

Create or modify .gdbinit in your home directory so that it contains the following code to look for and load the compiler module's pretty-print driver. It is Python, so indentation matters!

python
import os, sys
gcc_python_dir = os.environ.get('HPC_GCC_PYTHON_DIR')
if gcc_python_dir:
   sys.path.insert(0, gcc_python_dir)
   from libstdcxx.v6.printers import register_libstdcxx_printers
   register_libstdcxx_printers (None)
end

Whenever you load the GDB module, load the appropriate GCC module along with it: 

module load gdb/9.2 gcc/9.3.0
Now, when you start GDB, the libstdcxx pretty-printers will be available: 
$ gdb -q

(gdb) info pretty-printer 
global pretty-printers:
  builtin
    mpx_bound128
  libstdc++-v6
    __gnu_cxx::_Slist_iterator
    __gnu_cxx::__8::_Slist_iterator
    ...
    ...

Categories

programming