10.16 Operating System Auxiliary Information

GDB provides interfaces to useful OS facilities that can help you debug your program.

Some operating systems supply an auxiliary vector to programs at startup. This is akin to the arguments and environment that you specify for a program, but contains a system-dependent variety of binary values that tell system libraries important details about the hardware, operating system, and process. Each value’s purpose is identified by an integer tag; the meanings are well-known but system-specific. Depending on the configuration and operating system facilities, GDB may be able to show you this information. For remote targets, this functionality may further depend on the remote stub’s support of the ‘qXfer:auxv:read’ packet, see qXfer auxiliary vector read.

info auxv

Display the auxiliary vector of the inferior, which can be either a live process or a core dump file. GDB prints each tag value numerically, and also shows names and text descriptions for recognized tags. Some values in the vector are numbers, some bit masks, and some pointers to strings or other data. GDB displays each value in the most appropriate form for a recognized tag, and in hexadecimal for an unrecognized tag.

On some targets, GDB can access operating system-specific information and show it to you. The types of information available will differ depending on the type of operating system running on the target. The mechanism used to fetch the data is described in Operating System Information. For remote targets, this functionality depends on the remote stub’s support of the ‘qXfer:osdata:read’ packet, see qXfer osdata read.

info os infotype

Display OS information of the requested type.

On GNU/Linux, the following values of infotype are valid:

cpus

Display the list of all CPUs/cores. For each CPU/core, GDB prints the available fields from /proc/cpuinfo. For each supported architecture different fields are available. Two common entries are processor which gives CPU number and bogomips; a system constant that is calculated during kernel initialization.

files

Display the list of open file descriptors on the target. For each file descriptor, GDB prints the identifier of the process owning the descriptor, the command of the owning process, the value of the descriptor, and the target of the descriptor.

modules

Display the list of all loaded kernel modules on the target. For each module, GDB prints the module name, the size of the module in bytes, the number of times the module is used, the dependencies of the module, the status of the module, and the address of the loaded module in memory.

msg

Display the list of all System V message queues on the target. For each message queue, GDB prints the message queue key, the message queue identifier, the access permissions, the current number of bytes on the queue, the current number of messages on the queue, the processes that last sent and received a message on the queue, the user and group of the owner and creator of the message queue, the times at which a message was last sent and received on the queue, and the time at which the message queue was last changed.

processes

Display the list of processes on the target. For each process, GDB prints the process identifier, the name of the user, the command corresponding to the process, and the list of processor cores that the process is currently running on. (To understand what these properties mean, for this and the following info types, please consult the general GNU/Linux documentation.)

procgroups

Display the list of process groups on the target. For each process, GDB prints the identifier of the process group that it belongs to, the command corresponding to the process group leader, the process identifier, and the command line of the process. The list is sorted first by the process group identifier, then by the process identifier, so that processes belonging to the same process group are grouped together and the process group leader is listed first.

semaphores

Display the list of all System V semaphore sets on the target. For each semaphore set, GDB prints the semaphore set key, the semaphore set identifier, the access permissions, the number of semaphores in the set, the user and group of the owner and creator of the semaphore set, and the times at which the semaphore set was operated upon and changed.

shm

Display the list of all System V shared-memory regions on the target. For each shared-memory region, GDB prints the region key, the shared-memory identifier, the access permissions, the size of the region, the process that created the region, the process that last attached to or detached from the region, the current number of live attaches to the region, and the times at which the region was last attached to, detach from, and changed.

sockets

Display the list of Internet-domain sockets on the target. For each socket, GDB prints the address and port of the local and remote endpoints, the current state of the connection, the creator of the socket, the IP address family of the socket, and the type of the connection.

threads

Display the list of threads running on the target. For each thread, GDB prints the identifier of the process that the thread belongs to, the command of the process, the thread identifier, and the processor core that it is currently running on. The main thread of a process is not listed.

info os

If infotype is omitted, then list the possible values for infotype and the kind of OS information available for each infotype. If the target does not return a list of possible types, this command will report an error.