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Application Setup : I've C++11 application consuming the following 3rd party libraries :
The application code relies on several in-house shared objects, all of them developed by my team (classical link time against those shared objects is carried out, no usage of dlopen etc.)
I'm using GCC 4.6.2 and the issue appears when using GDB 7.4 and 7.6.
OS - Red Hat Linux release 7.0 (Guinness) x86-64
The issue
While hitting breakpoints within the shared objects code, and issuing gdb next command, sometimes GDB jumps backward to certain lines w/o any plausible reason (especially after exceptions are thrown, for those exceptions there suitable catch blocks)
Similar issues in the web are answered in something along the lines 'turn off any GCC optimization) but my GCC CL clearly doesn't use any optimization and asked to have debug information, pls note the -O0 & -g switches :
COLLECT_GCC_OPTIONS= '-D' '_DEBUG' '-O0' '-g' '-Wall' '-fmessage-length=0' '-v' '-fPIC' '-D' 'BOOST_ALL_DYN_LINK' '-D' 'BOOST_PARAMETER_MAX_ARITY=15' '-D' '_GLIBCXX_USE_NANOSLEEP' '-Wno-deprecated' '-std=c++0x' '-fvisibility=hidden' '-c' '-MMD' '-MP' '-MF' 'Debug_x64/AgentRegisterer.d' '-MT' 'Debug_x64/AgentRegisterer.d' '-MT' 'Debug_x64/AgentRegisterer.o' '-o' 'Debug_x64/AgentRegisterer.o' '-shared-libgcc' '-mtune=generic' '-march=x86-64'
Please also note as per Linux DSO best known methods, we have hidden visibility of symbols, only classes we would like to expose are being exposed (maybe this is related ???)
What should be the next steps in root causing this issue ?
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If the target environment supports it, gdb can allow you to “rewind” the program by running it backward. A target environment that supports reverse execution should be able to “undo” the changes in machine state that have taken place as the program was executing normally.
Start calc from within gdb using the run command. It will go into an infinite loop. Press Ctrl-C (like before) to stop your program.
To exit GDB, use the quit command (abbreviated q ), or type an end-of-file character (usually C-d ). If you do not supply expression , GDB will terminate normally; otherwise it will terminate using the result of expression as the error code.
Setting breakpoints A breakpoint is like a stop sign in your code -- whenever gdb gets to a breakpoint it halts execution of your program and allows you to examine it. To set breakpoints, type "break [filename]:[linenumber]". For example, if you wanted to set a breakpoint at line 55 of main.
This sort of problem is usually GIGO -- gdb is just acting in the way that the compiler has instructed it to act. So, it's typically a compiler bug rather than a gdb bug. I've seen this happen even with -O0 compilations. The example that comes to mind is that some versions of g++ emitted the location of a variable's declaration when emitting a call to the variable's destructor. This lead to this odd jumping behavior in otherwise straight-line code.
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