gdb support for SME-without-SVE ?

Peter Maydell via Gdb
2026-01-27T11:32:45Z

Hi: is GDB for Arm intended to support configurations where the target
CPU has SME but not SVE?

We're just implementing support for that in QEMU for using SME
with the hvf hypervisor accelerator on macos systems, but when
we tried connecting gdb to QEMU gdb crashed:

(gdb) target remote localhost:1234
Remote debugging using localhost:1234
../../gdb/aarch64-tdep.c:3068: internal-error:
aarch64_pseudo_register_type: bad register number 160
A problem internal to GDB has been detected,
further debugging may prove unreliable.
Fatal signal: Abort trap: 6

https://lore.kernel.org/qemu-devel/CAAjaMXZLG2aBtStRhyvmdENj1Z+Mx05BmDgyYUoYrc_ZnHwyVQ@mail.gmail.com/

Is this a known missing feature in GDB, or is it a config that's
supposed to work but we've got the XML register description wrong
somehow?

It looks from the aarch64-tdep.c code like perhaps GDB assumes
that the Vn vector registers only exist with SVE, but they also
exist in SME-only CPUs.

thanks
-- PMM