An ergonomic and easy-to-integrate implementation of the GDB Remote Serial Protocol in Rust, with full #![no_std] support.
gdbstub makes it easy to integrate powerful guest debugging support to your emulator / hypervisor / debugger / embedded project. By implementing just a few basic methods of the gdbstub::Target trait, you can have a rich GDB debugging session up and running in no time!
gdbstub's API makes extensive use of a technique called Inlineable Dyn Extension Traits (IDETs) to expose fine-grained, zero-cost control over enabled GDB protocol features without relying on compile-time features flags. Aside from making it effortless to toggle enabled protocol features, IDETs also ensure that any unimplemented features are guaranteed to be dead-code-eliminated in release builds!
If you're looking for a quick snippet of example code to see what a typical gdbstub integration might look like, check out examples/armv4t/gdb/mod.rs
Why use gdbstub?
gdbstub tries to abstract as much of the raw GDB protocol details from the user.
gdbstub comes with a community-curated collection of built-in architecture definitions for most popular platforms!qSupported packet response.gdbstub makes extensive use of Rust's powerful type system + generics to enforce protocol invariants at compile time, minimizing the number of tricky protocol details end users have to worry about.gdbstub enables fine-grained control over active protocol extensions without relying on clunky cargo features or the use of unsafe code!gdbstub's API is designed to be a "drop in" solution when you want to add debugging support into a project, and shouldn't require any large refactoring effort to integrate into an existing project.#![no_std] Ready & Size Optimized
gdbstub is a no_std first library, whereby all protocol features are required to be no_std compatible.gdbstub does not require any dynamic memory allocation, and can be configured to use fixed-size, pre-allocated buffers. This enables gdbstub to be used on even the most resource constrained, no-alloc platforms.gdbstub is entirely panic free in most minimal configurations*
paranoid_unsafe cargo feature, on certain platforms.example_no_std.gdbstub is transport-layer agnostic, and uses a basic Connection interface to communicate with the GDB server. As long as target has some method of performing in-order, serial, byte-wise I/O (e.g: putchar/getchar over UART), it's possible to run gdbstub on it!gdbstub's minimal configuration has an incredibly low binary size + RAM overhead, enabling it to be used on even the most resource-constrained microcontrollers.
min-sized-rust, a baseline gdbstub implementation can weigh in at less than 10kb of .text + .rodata! *gdbstub revision. Data was collected using the included example_no_std project compiled on x86_64.gdbstub in Production?Yes, as long as you don't mind some API churn until 1.0.0 is released.
Due to gdbstub's heavy use of Rust's type system in enforcing GDB protocol invariants at compile time, it's often been the case that implementing new GDB protocol features has required making some breaking API changes. While these changes are typically quite minor, they are nonetheless semver-breaking, and may require a code-change when moving between versions. Any particularly involved changes will typically be documented in a dedicated transition guide document.
That being said, gdbstub has already been integrated into many real-world projects since its initial 0.1 release, and empirical evidence suggests that it seems to be doing its job quite well! Thusfar, most reported issues have been caused by improperly implemented Target and/or Arch implementations, while the core gdbstub library itself has proven to be reasonably bug-free.
See the Future Plans + Roadmap to 1.0.0 for more information on what features gdbstub still needs to implement before committing to API stability with version 1.0.0.
The GDB Remote Serial Protocol is surprisingly complex, supporting advanced features such as remote file I/O, spawning new processes, "rewinding" program execution, and much, much more. Thankfully, most of these features are completely optional, and getting a basic debugging session up-and-running only requires implementing a few basic methods:
Yep, that's right! That's all it takes to get gdb connected!
Of course, most use-cases will want to support additional debugging features as well. At the moment, gdbstub implements the following GDB protocol extensions:
info mem)monitor Commands
monitor command!ExecFile)info auxv)Note: GDB features are implemented on an as-needed basis by gdbstub's contributors. If there's a missing GDB feature that you'd like gdbstub to implement, please file an issue and/or open a PR!
For a full list of GDB remote features, check out the GDB Remote Configuration Docs for a table of GDB commands + their corresponding Remote Serial Protocol packets.
Using a technique called Inlineable Dyn Extension Traits (IDETs), gdbstub is able to leverage the Rust compiler's powerful optimization passes to ensure any unused features are dead-code-eliminated in release builds without having to rely on compile-time features flags!
For example, if your target doesn't implement a custom GDB monitor command handler, the resulting binary won't include any code related to parsing / handling the underlying qRcmd packet!
If you're interested in the low-level technical details of how IDETs work, I've included a brief writeup in the documentation here.
By default, the std and alloc features are enabled.
When using gdbstub in #![no_std] contexts, make sure to set default-features = false.
alloc
Connection for Box<dyn Connection>.log::trace! (uses a heap-allocated output buffer).GdbStub (if none is provided via GdbStubBuilder::with_packet_buffer).ConsoleOutput.std (implies alloc)
Connection for TcpStream and UnixStream.std::error::Error for gdbstub::Error.TargetError::Io variant to simplify std::io::Error handling from Target methods.paranoid_unsafe
unsafe in gdbstub section below for more details.gdbstub on no_std)
vmware-labs/node-replicated-kernel - An (experimental) research OS kernel for x86-64 (amd64) machinesbetrusted-io/xous-core - The Xous microkernel operating systemmemflow-cli)While some of these projects may use older versions of gdbstub, they can nonetheless serve as useful examples of what a typical gdbstub integration might look like.
If you end up using gdbstub in your project, consider opening a PR and adding it to this list!
These examples are built as part of the CI, and are guaranteed to be kept up to date with the latest version of gdbstub's API.
armv4t - ./examples/armv4t/
gdbstub support.target::ext features. This makes it a great resource when first implementing a new protocol extension!armv4t_multicore - ./examples/armv4t_multicore/
armv4t example.gdbstub's multithread extensions API, but not much else.example_no_std - ./example_no_std
gdbstub can be used in a #![no_std] project.armv4t/armv4t_multicore examples, this project does not include a working emulator, and simply stubs all gdbstub functions.gdbstub's approximate binary footprint (via the check_size.sh script), as well as validating certain dead-code-elimination optimizations.unsafe in gdbstubgdbstub limits its use of unsafe to a bare minimum, with all uses of unsafe required to have a corresponding // SAFETY comment as justification. The following list exhaustively documents all uses of unsafe in gdbstub.
rustc + LLVM do a pretty incredible job at eliding bounds checks... most of the time. Unfortunately, there are a few places in the code where the compiler is not smart enough to "prove" that a bounds check isn't needed, and a bit of unsafe code is required to remove those bounds checks.
Enabling the paranoid_unsafe feature will swap out a handful of unsafe get_unchecked_mut operations with their safe equivalents, at the expense of introducing panicking code into gdbstub. This feature is disabled by default, as the unsafe code has been aggressively audited and tested for correctness. That said, if you're particularly paranoid about the use of unsafe code, enabling this feature may offer some piece of mind.
When no cargo features are enabled:
NonZeroUsize::new_unchecked() when defining internal constants.When the paranoid_unsafe feature is enabled, the following unsafe code is removed:
src/protocol/packet.rs: Swaps a couple slice-index methods in PacketBuf to use get_unchecked_mut. The public API of struct ensures that the bounds used to index into the array remain in-bounds.src/protocol/common/hex.rs: Use an alternate implementation of decode_hex_buf/decode_bin_buf which uses unsafe slice indexing.src/common.rs: Use a checked transmute to convert a u8 to a SignalWhen the std feature is enabled:
src/connection/impls/unixstream.rs: An implementation of UnixStream::peek which uses libc::recv. This manual implementation will be removed once rust-lang/rust#76923 is stabilized.1.0.0While the vast majority of GDB protocol features (e.g: remote filesystem support, tracepoint packets, most query packets, etc...) should not require breaking API changes, the following features will most likely require at least some breaking API changes, and should therefore be implemented prior to 1.0.0.
Not that this is not an exhaustive list, and is subject to change.
Arch trait (#12)target::ext::base::multiprocess API.gdbstub already implements multiprocess extensions "under-the-hood", and just hard-codes a fake PID, so this is mostly a matter of "putting in the work".target extended-remote)gdbstub running in a "bare-metal" #![no_std] environment.Additionally, while not strict blockers to 1.0.0, it would be good to explore these features as well:
gdbstub commit to a MSRV?RawRegId from gdbstub_arch (#29)async/await interfaces (particularly wrt. handling GDB client interrupts) (#36)gdbstub is free and open source! All code in this repository is dual-licensed under either:
at your option. This means you can select the license you prefer! This dual-licensing approach is the de-facto standard in the Rust ecosystem and there are very good reasons to include both.
Unless you explicitly state otherwise, any contribution intentionally submitted for inclusion in the work by you, as defined in the Apache-2.0 license, shall be dual licensed as above, without any additional terms or conditions.