All notable changes to this project will be documented in this file.

This project adheres to Semantic Versioning.

0.5.0

While the overall structure of the API has remained the same, 0.5.0 does introduce a few breaking API changes that require some attention. That being said, it should not be a difficult migration, and updating to 0.5.0 from 0.4 shouldn't take more than 10 mins of refactoring.

Check out transition_guide.md for guidance on upgrading from 0.4.x to 0.5.

New Features

  • Implement Run-Length-Encoding (RLE) on outgoing packets
    • This significantly cuts down on the data being transferred over the wire when reading from registers/memory
  • Add target-specific kind: Arch::BreakpointKind parameters to the Breakpoint API
    • While emulated systems typically implement breakpoints by pausing execution once the PC hits a certain value, “real” systems typically need to patch the instruction stream with a breakpoint instruction. On systems with variable-sized instructions, this kind parameter specifies the size of the instruction that should be injected.
  • Implement ResumeAction::{Step,Continue}WithSignal
  • Added the Exited(u8), Terminated(u8), and ReplayLog("begin"|"end") stop reasons.
  • Added DisconnectReason::Exited(u8) and DisconnectReason::Terminated(u8).
  • Reworked the MultiThreadOps::resume API to be significantly more ergonomic and efficient

New Protocol Extensions

  • {Single,Multi}ThreadReverse{Step,Continue} - Support for reverse-step and reverse-continue. #48 (DrChat)
  • {Single,Multi}ThreadRangeStepping - Optional optimized range stepping support.

Breaking Arch Changes

  • gdbstub::arch has been moved into a separate gdbstub_arch crate
    • See #45 for details on why this was done.
  • (x86) Break GPRs & SRs into individual fields/variants #34

Breaking API Changes

  • Base Protocol Refactors
    • Reworked the MultiThreadOps::resume API
    • Added a wrapper around the raw check_gdb_interrupt callback, hiding the underlying implementation details
    • Extracted base protocol single-register access methods ({read,write}_register) into separate SingleRegisterAccess trait
      • These are optional GDB protocol methods, and as such, should be modeled as IDETs
  • Protocol Extension Refactors
    • Consolidated the {Hw,Sw}Breakpoints/Watchpoints IDETs under a single Breakpoints IDET + sub-IDETs
    • Added new arch-specific kind: Arch::BreakpointKind parameter to add_{hw,sw}_breakpoint methods
    • Renamed target::ext::extended_mod::ConfigureASLR{Ops} to ConfigureAslr{Ops} (clippy::upper_case_acronyms)
  • Added {Step,Continue}WithSignal variants to target::ext::base::ResumeAction
  • Trait Changes
    • arch::Arch: Added type BreakpointKind. Required to support arch-specific breakpoint kinds
    • arch::Arch: (very minor) Added num_traits::FromPrimitive bound to Arch::Usize
    • arch::Registers: Added type ProgramCounter and associated fn pc(&self) -> Self::ProgramCounter method. Added preemptively in anticipation of future GDB Agent support
  • Removed the Halted stop reason (more accurate to simply return {Exited|Terminated}(SIGSTOP) instead).
  • Removed the Halted disconnect reason (replaced with the Exited and Terminated stop reasons instead).
  • Removed the implicit ExtendedMode attached PID tracking when alloc was available. See 23b56038 rationale behind this change.

Internal Improvements

  • Split monolithic GdbStubImpl implementation into separate files (by protocol extension)
  • Finally rewrite + optimize GdbStubImpl::do_vcont, along with streamlining its interactions with the legacy s and c packets
  • Sprinkle more IDET-based dead code elimination hints (notably wrt. stop reasons)
  • Remove the default self.current_mem_tid hack, replacing it with a much more elegant solution
  • Packet Parser improvements
    • Remove last remaining bit of UTF-8 related code
    • Eliminate as much panicking bounds-checking code as possible
    • support efficient parsing of packets that are parsed differently depending on active protocol extension (namely, the breakpoint packets)
    • (currently unused) Zero-cost support for parsing Z and z packets with embedded agent bytecode expressions
  • Use intra-doc links whenever possible

Bugfixes

  • Fix RiscvRegId for arch::riscv::Riscv64 #46 (fzyz999)

0.4.5

New Protocol Extensions

  • TargetDescriptionXmlOverride - Allow targets to override the target description XML file (target.xml) specified by Target::Arch::target_description_xml. This is useful in cases where a Target is expected to be generic over multiple architectures. #43 (with help from DrChat)

0.4.4

Bugfixes

  • use write! instead of writeln! in output! macro #41

0.4.3

New Arch Implementations

0.4.2

Packaging

0.4.1

New Arch Implementations

Bugfixes

  • Switch fatal error signal from T06 to S05,
  • specify cfg-if 0.1.10 or later #33 (keiichiw)
    • cargo build fails if cfg-if is 0.1.9 or older

Internal Improvements

  • Don't hard-code u64 when parsing packets (use big-endian byte arrays + late conversion to Target::Arch::Usize).

0.4.0

This version includes a major API overhaul, alongside a slew of new features and general improvements. While updating to 0.4.0 will require some substantial code modifications, it's well worth the effort, as 0.4.0 is the safest, leanest, and most featureful release of gdbstub yet!

Fun fact: Even after adding a bunch of new features and bug-fixes, the in-tree example_no_std has remained just as small! The example on the semver-fix-0.2.2 branch is 20251 bytes, while the example on 0.4.0 is 20246 bytes.

Breaking API Changes

  • Rewrite the Target API in terms of “Inlineable Dyn Extension Traits” (IDETs)
    • By breaking up Target into smaller pieces which can be mixed-and-matched, it not only makes it easier to get up-and-running with gdbstub, but it also unlocks a lot of awesome internal optimizations:
      • Substantially reduces binary-size footprint by guaranteeing dead-code-elimination of parsing/handling unimplemented GDB protocol features.
      • Compile-time enforcement that certain groups of methods are implemented in-tandem (e.g: add_sw_breakpoint and remove_sw_breakpoint).
  • Update the Target API with support for non-fatal error handling.
    • The old approach of only allowing *fatal* errors was woefully inadequate when dealing with potentially fallible operations such as reading from unauthorized memory (which GDB likes to do a bunch), or handling non-fatal std::io::Error that occur as a result of ExtendedMode operations. The new TargetResult/TargetError result is much more robust, and opens to door to supporting additional error handling extensions (such as LLDB's ASCII Errors).
  • Update the Connection trait with new methods (flush - required, write_all, on_session_start)
  • Lift Registers::RegId to Arch::RegId, and introduce new temporary RegIdImpl solution for avoiding breaking API changes due to new RegId implementations (see #29)
  • Mark various RegId enums as #[non_exhaustive], allowing more registers to be added if need be.
  • Error types are now marked as #[non_exhaustive].

New Protocol Extensions

  • ExtendedMode - Allow targets to run new processes / attach to existing processes / restart execution.
    • Includes support for set disable-randomization, set environment, set startup-with-shell, and set cwd and cd.
  • SectionOffsets - Get section/segment relocation offsets from the target. #30 (mchesser)
    • Uses the qOffsets packet under-the-hood.

Bugfixes

  • Fix issues related to selecting the incorrect thread after hitting a breakpoint in multi-threaded targets.
  • Ensure that set_nodelay is set when using a TcpStream as a Connection (via the new Connection::on_session_start API)
    • This should result in a noticeable performance improvement when debugging over TCP.

Internal Improvements

  • Removed btou dependency.
  • Removed all UTF-8 aware str handling code.
    • GDB uses a pure ASCII protocol, so including code to deal with UTF-8 resulted in unnecessary binary bloat.

0.3.0 (formerly 0.2.2)

This version contains a few minor breaking changes from 0.2.1. These are only surface-level changes, and can be fixed with minimal effort.

Version 0.3.0 is identical to the yanked version 0.2.2, except that it adheres to cargo's modified SemVer rule which states that the pre-0.x.y breaking changes should still bump the minor version.

Thanks to h33p for reporting this issue (#27)

Breaking API Changes

  • Update Target::resume API to replace raw &mut dyn Iterator with a functionally identical concrete Actions iterator.
  • Mark the StopReason enum as #[non_exhaustive], allowing further types to be added without being considered as an API breaking change.

New Protocol Extensions

  • Add Target::read/write_register support (to support single register accesses) #22 (thomashk0)
  • Add StopReason::Signal(u8) variant, to send arbitrary signal codes #19 (mchesser)

New Arch Implementations

0.2.1

New Arch Implementations

Internal Improvements

  • Documentation improvements
    • Document PC adjustment requirements in Target::resume
    • Add docs on handling non-fatal invalid memory reads/writes in Target::read/write_addrs.

0.2.0

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