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Hi,
The unknown code address could be an interrupt handler from the prebuilt esp8266 libraries. Generally, it is possible to do the proper stepping given one hardware breakpoint, however the corresponding part of the the xtensa gdb is very buggy and often gets confused. The reason why this functionality works out-of-the-box for ARM devices is that ARM has been around for decades, so the underlying tools have matured to handle common scenarios flawlessly. ESP8266 is based on a much less popular CPU architecture, the corresponding low-level tools are less developed and behave more sporadically.
Our primary goal with ESP8266/ESP32 is to keep VisualGDB affordable to the hobbyist community, that are the primary users of those devices, so we don’t go very deep in fixing the toolchain issues, instead providing a user-friendly layer on top of the tools. The unfortunate disadvantage of this is that VisualGDB inherits many of the ESP8266 gdb bugs until Espressif fixes the underlying tools.
We are also considering a crowdfinding campaign to fix the most annoying issues in the low-level open-source tools (keeping the fixes open-source of course), but currently it is hard to provide any specific timeframe estimates on that.
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