GDB 9.1 Released

February 8, the development team of open-source GNU Debugger (GDB) announced the latest version GDB 9.1. This release comes with notable feature improvements, including experimental support for multi-threaded symbol loading.

GDB is a source-level debugger that supports a wide range of languages like C/C++, Go, and Rust. It can be used on various platforms like Linux, macOS, and UNIx.

GDB 9.1 is the latest major release following version 8 series, which was released in January 2018. Now ‘.’ (dot) can be used in command names. Also, ‘printf’ and ‘eval’ commands can directly output lines in C and Ada style. There are many other improvements added to the existing commands.

There are a number of new commands, like ‘define-prefix’, which allows users to define one’s own prefix commands. There’s also a new command added to GDB/MI.

Although still being experimental, now multi-threaded symbol loading is possible. This high performance computing feature is turned off by default. In order to use it, use the GDB maintenance command ‘maint’ to turn the feature on.

Python scripting feature has been improved with some Python API improvements. Also, GDB can compile with Python 3 on Windows platform.

On the other hand, debugging support for the Cell Broadband Engine is removed, and GDB no longer supports Solaris 10 environment. GNU make 3.82 is required for building GDB and GDBserver.

GDB 9.1 is available on the project website.

The GNU Project Debugger
https://www.gnu.org/software/gdb/