gdb eats 100% cpu for relative long time when I single step one instruction

[Thomas Glanzmann <sithglan@stud.uni-erlangen.de>]

Hello,
I tried to debug an opera binary without debugging information and did
the following:

gdb ./opera
	b *0x0838FF00
	layout asm
	layout regs
	run 2> /dev/null

When I hit the breakpoint gdb starts eating my CPU. I have Athlon XP
1700 running Linux 2.6 Debian Sarge. After I get the gdb prompt back I
type ni to singlestep to 'push %ebp' which takes a few seconds. I
started top and saw that gdb eats my cpu. My X is nearly freezed and I
also have trouble to change windows between windows in remote and local
screen sessions.

Whatever my guess is that gdb does some data analyzing it takes very
long because the binary is compiled without debugging information. Is
there a switch that I can turn this off or how can I check what gdb does
while it blocks my machine during the single step?

This happens *only* when I call 'layout asm' gdb thinks that I am in the
function jzero_far which is at 0x81cd12a but I am actually in a funtion
without a debugging symbol at 0x838fdcb, so I think the 'layout regs'
tries to analyse this few thousand instructions or whatever. Is there a
way to tell 'layout regs' to show only the few surrounding instructions?

	Thomas