"Program received signal SIGILL, Illegal instruction" on putting breakpoint while using gdb-gdbserver for remote debugging

"Program received signal SIGILL, Illegal instruction" on putting breakpoint while using gdb-gdbserver for remote debugging

[himanshu sardana]

I am trying to remote debug an application which resides in an Intel
x86 system. I am using gdbserver on the target machine and gdb on the
host machine which is Intel x86 as well.

The application is a single threaded application. The code was
compiled using gcc with '-g' switch to enable debugging.
gcc -g -o main_app main_app.c

I am facing problems if I put any breakpoint once the debug session is
running and connected with the remote machine. Following steps were
done to start debugging:

=====================================================
$> gdb ./main_app

(gdb) target remote 192.168.202.156:2108
Remote debugging using 192.168.202.156:2108
0xfc140020 in ?? ()
(gdb)
=====================================================

After these steps if I simply 'continue' the program, the program
executes fine and then terminates properly. But, If I put a breakpoint
and then continue execution I get the following problem:

Program received signal SIGILL, Illegal instruction.
0x52034000 in ?? ()

What may be the problem due to which I get the above error.

Also, when I execute "target remote 192.168.202.156:2108", I get
QUESTION MARKS (??) alone with the address info i.e. "0xfc140020 in ??
()". I am suspecting that I should get the application name i.e.
"main_app" instead of '??'. I am not sure on this but I tried
remote-debugging using a similar setup long time back and I have a
slight memory that there was application name instead of '??'. But,
again, I am not very sure of that.

Also I tried an another command in gdb which was

(gdb) add-symbol-file main_app 0xfc140020

This asks me to Enter 'y' to read symbol file and it shows no error on
reading but still I get same problem.

Any suggestions will be highly appreciable.

Thanks,
Himanshu

Re: "Program received signal SIGILL, Illegal instruction" on putting breakpoint while using gdb-gdbserver for remote debugging

[karthikeyan.s]

Try using only hardware breakpoint.
What version of linux kernel are you using? Such issues are observed
in new processor cores which do not have proper cache framework
implemented in the kernel, arm cortex-a9 is a good example for that.

-Karthik