GNU Debugger Lands Microsoft Windows Support Improvement

The GNU Debugger (GDB) is seeing the start of improvements to enhance its Microsoft Windows debugging experience.

GDB debugging for Windows executables is not new, but up until now it has used the Cygwin OS ABI for everything on the platform -- including for the likes of MinGW produced binaries.

GDB to now hasn't differentiated between Windows binaries built by Cygwin and those that are not.So introduced this week is a new Windows OS ABI for GDB to differentiate from the Cygwin OS ABI.

This came about after at least one known bug due to differences between Cygwin binaries and others. The default OS ABI will still be Cygwin for GDBs built with the Cygwin target, but in allowing the Windows OS ABI to be detected for other binaries should help in ultimately working out bugs in the future and any other related support improvements.

More details on the new Windows OS ABI via this GDB commit. There are several other commits as part of this work including this fix as a result of the specialized Cygwin binary handling.