The developers of the GNU Project Debugger (GDB) have released version 7.6 of their tool. Among GDB's new features are native as well as target configurations for ARM's new AArch 64 architecture and the addition numerous new commands and options.

Users can now set and show print type methods and print type definitions as well as the size of the trace buffer, as well as toggling debug settings for aarch64, coff-pe-read, mach-o and notification. Another important change is that target record has been renamed to target record-full. The newly added target record-btrace command uses hardware support to record the control flow of a process.

The developers have also put quite a bit of work into the new version's Python scripting: GDB 7.6 supports Python 3 and, for example, allows vectors to be created via gdb.Type.vector; the new gdb.Architecture class exposes GDB's internal representation of the architecture in the Python API. Types can also be pretty-printed by Python for better readability. The Frame.architecture method can now return the gdb.Architecture object that corresponds to the frame's architecture.

The added native configurations in GDB 7.6 are ARM AArch64 GNU/Linux, FreeBSD/powerpc, 86_64/Cygwin and Tilera TILE-Gx GNU/Linux. New target configuration are ARM AArch64, ARM AArch64 GNU/Linux, Lynx 178 PowerPC, x86_64/Cygwin, and Tilera TILE-Gx GNU/Linux. Further information on the new version of the de-facto standard debugger for Linux systems can be found in the release announcement. GDB is available to download from the project's FTP server and is licensed under the GPLv3.

(fab)