Using gdbserver and arm-eabi-gdb to debug native code in Android

[First written by Steve Guo, please keep the mark if forwarding.]

Assume your target board's IP address is 192.168.1.101. Your host dev machine's IP address is 192.168.1.100. Your Android source code is in ~/mydroid.

In the target board, you should do the following things.

1. Make sure you have replaced libc.so with the version containing symbol information. (You should copy ~/mydroid/out/target/XXX/symbols/system/lib/libc.so), otherwise you will met issue when debugging multi-thread app. Because libthread_db.so depends on a _thread_created_hook symbol in libc.so.

2. Copy ~/mydroid/prebuilt/android-arm/gdbserver/gdbserver into board rootfs.

3. You can launch gdbserver by the following two commands:

#gdbserver 192.168.1.101:5544 --attach $(PID)

#gdbserver 192.168.1.101:5544 $(YOUR_APP)

The first command is to debug an already run process, the second command is to debug a new process. 5544 is a random port you can use any.

In the host develop machine, you should do the following things.

1. Add ~/mydroid/prebuilt/linux-x86/toolchain/arm-eabi-4.2.1/bin into $PATH so that you can directly use arm-eabi-gdb.

$export PATH=$PATH:~/mydroid/prebuilt/linux-x86/toolchain/arm-eabi-4.2.1/bin

2. launch arm-eabi-gdb and in the gdb shell environment, type the following commands:

(gdb) set solib-search-path ~/mydroid/out/target/product/avlite/symbols/system/lib:~/mydroid/out/target/product/avlite/symbols/system/bin

(gdb) target remote 192.168.1.101:5544

3. The remaining things is how you use gdb, it's not covered in this topic.

Note:

There are the following know issues now:

1. n and s does not work now for multi-thread app.

2. p does not work correctly for C++ symbol.