improvement proposal for gdb debugging sessions

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Vokuhila-Oliba
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improvement proposal for gdb debugging sessions

Post by Vokuhila-Oliba »

I would like to propose an improvement for gdb debugging sessions.

Here is some background:

At work I have to deal with a very very big-sized application.

Some examples:
  • release build Linux: 50MB
  • debug build Linux: 800MB
  • debug build AIX: 1.2GB - but that's a different story
When I start a debug session it takes quite a long time to read all the symbols. But that's OK. The debugee is large - so it needs some time.

However when I need to restart the debug session for some reason - these large amount of symbols has already been read. And as long as the executable file hasn't changed in the meantime there is not really a need to reload the executable.

When I use a "normal" gdb command prompt it behaves exactly like that: I can "restart" the debugging session by simply using the 'run' command again. GDB has already seen the symbols and it doesn't load the whole executable file again.

A codelite debug session works different - the "restart" triggers a complete file read again.

If it is somehow possible I would very appreciate a behavior similar to the "normal" GDB command line interface - maybe CodeLite could ask "reload executable file - or reuse it (Y/N)?"