Embedded Debugging

How to build GDB for ARM debugging with embedded-Python3

Sometimes, you could not find a GDB build for ARM target (arm-none-eabi) with Python3 support on GDB. In this situation you can quickly build your own GDB with Python3 support and arm-none-eabi target.

You may need some build-time dependencies

I had to install libgmp-dev package for Debian. If you have some missing build dependencies, configure script will say the missing library, just find it in your package management system and install.

Follow these steps

cd ~
wget https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/gdb/gdb-11.1.tar.xz
tar zxvf gdb-11.1.tar.gz
mkdir gdb-11.1-build
cd gdb-11.1-build
../gdb-11.1/configure --with-python=/usr/bin/python3 --target=arm-none-eabi --enable-interwork --enable-multilib
make

As you see, you should pass your Python3 executable to configure script's --with-python paramter just like --with-python=/usr/bin/python3.

Starting GDBFrontend with your GDB build

After build is successful, you should can run GDBFrontend like this:

gdbfrontend -g $(realpath ~/gdb-11.1-build/gdb/gdb) -G --data-directory=$(realpath ~/gdb-11.1-build/gdb/data-directory/)

It looks like this: