Guest debugging details¶

EKA2L1's remote GDB stub debugs the ARM guest. A native debugger attached to EKA2L1 itself debugs the host emulator. For the regular GUI workflow, use Debug the GUI guest and the saved CLion Run/Debug profiles.

Symbol files and source mapping¶

Keep the exact ELF that produced the E32 image. The E32 is the loader input; DWARF symbols and line tables remain in the ELF. The maintained GUI example publishes both under .symbian/gui-app/.

Its source prefixes are stable for reproducible builds:

Recorded prefix	Local source
`/symbian-src/gui_app`	`examples/gui_app`
`/symbian-sdk/include`	`.symbian/gui-sdk/include`
`/symbian-build/gui_app`	`.symbian/gui-app/cmake`

Inspect the ELF and compilation database before booting:

macOSLinux (provisional)

"$(brew --prefix llvm)/bin/llvm-dwarfdump" --verify \
  .symbian/gui-app/gui_app.elf
"$(brew --prefix llvm)/bin/clangd" --check=examples/gui_app/app.cc \
  --compile-commands-dir=.symbian/gui-app

llvm-dwarfdump --verify .symbian/gui-app/gui_app.elf
clangd --check=examples/gui_app/app.cc \
  --compile-commands-dir=.symbian/gui-app

Install clangd and llvm-dwarfdump from the same LLVM toolchain used by the build if your distribution splits them into separate packages.

Compiler parsing and DWARF inspection do not prove guest execution. Optimized locals may be unavailable at a breakpoint.

Manual GDB session¶

The guest's actual load address comes from its run log. The GUI ELF link code base is 0x8000; calculate the symbol slide as actual runtime code base minus 0x8000. Do not reuse a slide from another session. The pinned research frontend binds the GDB stub to loopback when enabled in the disposable instance's config.yml:

cpu: dynarmic
enable-gdb-stub: true
gdb-port: 24689

After launching the image with the stub enabled, open arm-none-eabi-gdb (or gdb-multiarch on Linux) and replace the paths and SLIDE with values from this run:

set architecture arm
file /absolute/repo/.symbian/gui-app/gui_app.elf
symbol-file -o SLIDE /absolute/repo/.symbian/gui-app/gui_app.elf
set substitute-path /symbian-src/gui_app /absolute/repo/examples/gui_app
target remote 127.0.0.1:24689
break GuiRunThread
continue

The stub controls the whole guest, rather than providing a per-process Symbian debug agent. Retain the selected firmware, E32/ELF hashes, run log, load address and guest exit result with observations. The emulator control guide covers managed sessions.