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While debugging a Qt 5 application, I am sometimes not interested in the internals of Qt 5 but in the structure of the application itself. Therefore I do not need to load all debugging symbols of the Qt 5 libraries since these take a few seconds to load.
Is it possible to prevent GDB from loading symbols for these Qt 5 libraries while keeping the debugging symbols for my application?
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A Debugging Symbol Table maps instructions in the compiled binary program to their corresponding variable, function, or line in the source code. This mapping could be something like: Program instruction ⇒ item name, item type, original file, line number defined.
The usual symbol file is the file containing the program which GDB is debugging. GDB can be directed to use a different file for symbols (with the symbol-file command), and it can also read more symbols via the "add-file" and "load" commands, or while reading symbols from shared libraries.
A command file for GDB is a file of lines that are GDB commands. Comments (lines starting with # ) may also be included. An empty line in a command file does nothing; it does not mean to repeat the last command, as it would from the terminal. When you start GDB, it automatically executes commands from its init files.
Is it possible to prevent GDB from loading symbols for these Qt 5 libraries while keeping the debugging symbols for my application?
Yes.
As Richard Critten's comment mentions, setting auto-solib-add to 0 will prevent loading of symbols for all shared libraries, and you can then add files manually with the sharedlibrary command (which accepts a regex). If this regex is omitted, then all shared libraries are loaded.
That however would prevent auto-loading of all symbols (not just debug symbols), and would also prevent auto-loading of symbols for system libraries, which are often required to unwind the stack.
A better approach may be to save a copy of Qt5 libraries with full debug info somewhere, e.g. ~/Qt5-debug/, then run strip -g on the original libraries. That way, you will get symbolic info for all libraries, and in the rare case when you actually need full-debug info for Qt5, you can still do that using the GDB file ~/Qt5-debug/libQt5Core.so.5.2 or similar commands.
The chapter GDB Files from the GDB manual has more documentation on using such separate debugging symbols.
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