If you were previously debugging some native Android code with ndk-gdb, you have probably noticed some instabilities and annoying bugs. But would you ever assume that a whole bunch of those problems is caused by a horribly outdated version of gdb and gdbserver, its counterpart, provided with Android NDK r8?

I would not. Just until one of our VisualGDB customers casually asked why can’t he see the contents of NEON registers in Visual Studio when he hovers the mouse over such a register. A quick investigation showed that the Android port of gdb and gdbserver has been maintained over the last years with features added and bugs fixed, but due to some unknown reason the NDK is shipped with an ancient gdb 6.6 released back in 2006.

So what I just did is built gdb 7.4.1 and gdbserver 7.4.1 from sources with Android patches, fixed some minor compilation and script errors and replaced the original NDK binaries with them. The result is quite inspiring:

• The newer GDB shows the NEON registers (such as $d0) normally.
• The THUMB code is disassembled normally even without debug symbols.
• I’ve just got a feeling that it is somewhat faster and crashes quite a bit less.
• It supports pending breakpoints (althrough requires the sharedlibrary command to rebind them).

I have no clue why the Android NDK maintainers put the ancient build of gdb into the NDK releases and totally ignore the new versions. Maybe, they did not have time to test them, maybe there are compatibility issues with some devices… Unfortunately, we could only guess. There’s one thing for sure though, the 7.4.1 build looks a lot better than the prehistoric 6.6 and has saved us a lot of time and nerve already. Maybe it can do the same for you.

Just to conclude, we have uploaded the pre-built gdb/gdbserver 7.4.1 to our website along with the installation instructions. If you are debugging NDK code on a daily basis, give it a try… BTW, we’ve also included it into the VisualGDB installer and enabled it by default.