Re: Postmortem debugging with arm-none-eabi-gdb from memory dump (not core)

On 14 October 2017 at 21:52, Hesham M <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Fri, Oct 13, 2017 at 4:19 PM, Yao Qi <[email protected]> wrote:
>> On 17-10-05 05:55:38, Hesham M wrote:
>>> Hi all,
>>>
>>> As this is my first email to the list, and as an old user for gdb, I'd like
>>> first to thank the gdb community for their effort.
>>>
>>> In a bare-metal ARM system, is there a way to use arm-none-eabi-gdb for
>>> postmortem debugging, the same way we do when we debug with core file on
>>> Linux, for example?
>>>
>>> The issue is that I don't have a "core" file but I can generate memory dump
>>> of the whole memory (ROM is already known and through the hardware debugger
>>> used I can write the RAM contents to a file (outside the target of course).
>>> I can also collect the registers at the time of the crash. I can do the
>>> debugging/analysis if I connect gdb to the target at the time of the crash
>>> but I need to do this in later time away from the target. I hope to find a
>>> way to debug with memory dumps the same way gdb debugs with core files.
>>>
>>> Of course if I can convert the memory dump to a valid core file, it might
>>> be another path to the solution. I don't know how to do that or if there is
>>> a tool that can help with this conversion.
>>>
>>> Any idea if this is possible?
>>
>> I prefer this approach, and it is possible.  GDB has a command "gcore",
>> https://sourceware.org/gdb/current/onlinedocs/gdb/Core-File-Generation.html#index-generate_002dcore_002dfile
>> you can take a loop how GDB does it.

Core dump are just ELF files, you might be able to create one yourself:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5986366/elf-core-file-format


>>
>>>
>>> A variant of this is idea is done for Keil tools:
>>> https://os.mbed.com/blog/entry/Post-mortem-debugging-with-ARM-mbed/
>>>
>>> I have posted a similar question on stackoverflow but they closed it! So,
>>> please let me know if my question isn't clear.

Do you have a link to this SO question?

Chris