I noticed that running test-case gdb.mi/mi-exec-run.exp with host board local-remote-host.exp takes about 44 seconds. I found two silent timeouts responsible for this. The first is in mi_gdb_exit, where we have: ... if { [is_remote host] && [board_info host exists fileid] } { send_gdb "999-gdb-exit\n" gdb_expect 10 { -re "y or n" { send_gdb "y\n" exp_continue } -re "Undefined command.*$gdb_prompt $" { send_gdb "quit\n" exp_continue } -re "DOSEXIT code" { } } } ... so in gdb.log we see: ... 999-gdb-exit^M 999^exit^M =thread-exited,id="1",group-id="i1"^M =thread-group-exited,id="i1"^M ... after which expect just waits for the timeout. Fix this by adding a gdb_expect clause to parse the exit: ... -re "\r\n999\\^exit\r\n" { } ... Note that we're not parsing the thread-exited/thread-group-exited messages, because they may not be present: ... $ gdb -i=mi =thread-group-added,id="i1" (gdb) 999-gdb-exit 999^exit $ ... After fixing that, we have: ... (gdb) ^M saw mi error PASS: gdb.mi/mi-exec-run.exp: inferior-tty=separate: mi=separate: \ force-fail=1: run failure detected quit^M &"quit\n"^M ... What seems to be happening is that default_gdb_exit sends a cli interpreter quit command to an mi interpreter, after which again expect just waits for the timeout. Fix this by adding mi_gdb_exit to the end of the test-case, as in many other gdb.mi/*.exp test-cases. After these two fixes, the test-case takes about 4 seconds. Tested on x86_64-linux.