3.30.14. Debugging with the GNU Project Debugger (GDB) on the Target

The previous section addressed using GDB remotely for debugging purposes, which is the most usual case due to the inherent hardware limitations on many embedded devices. However, debugging in the target hardware itself is also possible with more powerful devices. This section describes what you need to do in order to support using GDB to debug on the target hardware.

To support this kind of debugging, you need do the following:

Note

To improve the debug information accuracy, you can reduce the level of optimization used by the compiler. For example, when adding the following line to your local.conf file, you will reduce optimization from FULL_OPTIMIZATION of "-O2" to DEBUG_OPTIMIZATION of "-O -fno-omit-frame-pointer":
     DEBUG_BUILD = "1"
                    
Consider that this will reduce the application's performance and is recommended only for debugging purposes.