4.69. gdb

Prior to this update, GDB could stop on error when trying to access the libpthread shared library before the library was relocated. Fixed GDB lets the relocations to be resolved first, making such program debuggable.

The Intel Fortran Compiler records certain debug info symbols in uppercase but the gfortran compiler writes case-insensitive symbols in lowercase. As a result, GDB could terminate unexpectedly when accessing uppercase characters in the debug information from the Intel Fortran Compiler. With this update, GDB properly implements case insensitivity and ignores the symbols case in the symbol files.

When the user selected the "-statistics" option with a negative number as a result, GDB printed the minus sign twice. This has been fixed and GDB now displays negative numbers with one minus sign only.

On the PowerPC and the IBM System z architectures, GDB displayed only LWP (light-weight process) identifiers which matched the Linux TID (Thread Identifier) values for the threads found in the core file. GDB has been fixed to initialize the libthread_db threads debugging library when accessing the core file. GDB now correctly displays the pthread_t identifier in addition to the LWP identifier on the aforementioned architectures.

Structure field offsets above 65535 described by the DWARF DW_AT_data_member_location attribute were improperly interpreted as a 0 value. GDB has been modified and can now handle also large structures and their fields.

The difference between the very closely related "ptype" and "whatis" commands was not clearly defined in the gdb info manual. Detailed differences between these commands have been described in the manual.

Prior to this update, the "info sources" subcommand printed only relative paths to the source files. GDB has been modified to correctly display the full path name to the source file.

Modifying a string in the executable using the "-write" command line option could fail with an error if the executable was not running. With this update, GDB can modify executables even before they are started.

With this update, Float16 instructions on future Intel processors are now supported.

Debugged programs can open many shared libraries on demand at runtime using the dlopen() function. Prior to this update, tracking shared libraries that were in use by the debugged program could lead to overhead. The debugging performance of GDB has been improved: the overhead is now lower if applications load many objects.

Prior to this update, GDB did not handle DWARF 4 .debug_types data correctly. Now, GDB can correctly process data in the DWARF 4 format.