Red Hat ENTERPRISE LINUX 3 - DEBUGGING WITH GDB Manual page 153

Chapter 17. gdb Files
NEVER_LOAD
An instruction to the linker to not output the section.
COFF_SHARED_LIBRARY
A notification to the linker that the section contains COFF shared library information.
IS_COMMON
Section contains common symbols.
set trust-readonly-sections on
Tell gdb that readonly sections in your object file really are read-only (that is, that their contents
will not change). In that case, gdb can fetch values from these sections out of the object file,
rather than from the target program. For some targets (notably embedded ones), this can be a
significant enhancement to debugging performance.
The default is off.
set trust-readonly-sections off
Tell gdb not to trust readonly sections. This means that the contents of the section might change
while the program is running, and must therefore be fetched from the target when needed.
All file-specifying commands allow both absolute and relative file names as arguments. gdb always
converts the file name to an absolute file name and remembers it that way.
gdb supports HP-UX, SunOS, SVr4, Irix 5, and IBM RS/6000 shared libraries.
gdb automatically loads symbol definitions from shared libraries when you use the
or when you examine a core file. (Before you issue the
references to a function in a shared library, however--unless you are debugging a core file).
On HP-UX, if the program loads a library explicitly, gdb automatically loads the symbols at the time
of the call.
shl_load
There are times, however, when you may wish to not automatically load symbol definitions from
shared libraries, such as when they are particularly large or there are many of them.
To control the automatic loading of shared library symbols, use the commands:
set auto-solib-add
If is , symbols from all shared object libraries will be loaded automatically when the
mode on
inferior begins execution, you attach to an independently started inferior, or when the dynamic
linker informs gdb that a new library has been loaded. If
manually, using the
show auto-solib-add
Display the current autoloading mode.
To explicitly load shared library symbols, use the
info share
info sharedlibrary
Print the names of the shared libraries which are currently loaded.
mode
command. The default value is
sharedlibrary
command, gdb does not understand
run
is
mode
command:
sharedlibrary
command,
run
, symbols must be loaded
off
.
on
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