Posted by snare on 25 June 2013. Tags: voltron, gdb, debugging

Update December 2014: This post is now somewhat outdated, please see the github repo for more up to date information.

Wow, first post for 2013 and it’s June already. I suck at this blogging thing. If you’ve been following my Twitter, you probably know that I’m now working at Azimuth Security. I’ll also be speaking at the Nordic Security Conference in Reykjavik, Iceland in September - details will follow when I think of a name for my talk.

Now. Unfortunately, GDB is the only viable option for some debugging tasks - for example, I haven’t found anything else that seems to work properly with VMware’s debug stub. Everybody’s pal fG! has done a great job with his gdbinit , which I’ve used for quite a while now, but as I’ve been using GDB version 7 a bit lately I decided to have a go at recreating some of the context info his gdbinit gives you in a python interface. This is the result:

Voltron is a python script that can be executed inside and outside of GDB. The code that runs inside GDB spins off a server thread and feeds out context information to clients that register for notifications. The code that runs outside GDB connects to the server, consumes this context information and renders it in a terminal. The idea being that you can tack a bunch of utility views onto GDB in other terminal windows (or iTerm panes, which is what I do).

It’s super hacky (I built it in a night in a fit of frustration), has some bugs, and needs a good refactoring, but it makes my life easier so I figured I should share it.

The code and documentation is on my GitHub.