RHBA-2008:0717 - Bug Fix Advisory

Topic

An updated gdb package that fixes various bugs is now available.

Description

The GNU debugger, gdb, allows the debugging of programs written in C, C++,
and other languages by executing them in a controlled fashion and then
printing out their data.

This updated package addresses the following issues:

• in certain situations, breakpoints in C++ constructors and destructors

were missed.

• in certain situations, watchpoints were missed after a debugged program

created a new process.

• certain watchpoints were missed during the "step" command.
• decoding the DWARF debugging information failed for certain large amounts

of debug information about application data structures.

• gdb's user interface would sometimes crash when the "focus" command was

called.

• some operations, such as the "info frame" command in particular, were

very slow for applications using libraries with many symbols.

• when using conditional software watchpoints, gdb sometimes crashed when a

variable used for the condition left the current code scope.

• the "gcore" command would generate an invalid core file for applications

with a mapped shared memory segment with shmid 0.

• on PowerPC the "break" command would stop execution later than the first

code instruction. This occured on optimized and position-independent code
(the "-O", "-fPIC", or "-O -fPIE" options) when the appropriate debuginfo
was used.

• on the Itanium (R) architecture, the "gcore" command executed very slowly

and gdb consumed a large amount of memory for debugged programs which used
more than 2GB of memory.

• on the Itanium architecture, a memory leak caused the gdb memory usage to

continually increase whenever the "c" ("continue") command was executed.
The memory was not freed while gdb was being executed.

• on certain unsupported operating systems, gdb would fail to build from

the source RPM due to a missing ".orig" file.

All users of gdb should upgrade to this updated package, which contains
backported patches to resolve these issues.

Solution

Before applying this update, make sure that all previously-released
errata relevant to your system have been applied.

This update is available via Red Hat Network. Details on how to use
the Red Hat Network to apply this update are available at
http://kbase.redhat.com/faq/FAQ_58_10188

Affected Products

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server 4 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server 4 ia64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server 4 i386
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Workstation 4 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Workstation 4 ia64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Workstation 4 i386
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop 4 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop 4 i386
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux for IBM z Systems 4 s390x
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux for IBM z Systems 4 s390
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Power, big endian 4 ppc

Fixes

• BZ - 338231 - PPC function breakpoint too far behind the prologue
• BZ - 349451 - Watchpoints missed after inferior's fork()
• BZ - 380881 - Leftover .orig file patched by a .src.rpm .patch file
• BZ - 409571 - [4.6][gcore] When the gcore command is executed, it takes a really long time.
• BZ - 439257 - Corrupted DWARF expression

CVEs

(none)

References

(none)