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Comment by briansteffens | Hacker News Reader

gdb is magic once you get the hang of it, I'd definitely recommend spending some time getting comfortable with it.

I've found it very buggy when working at the assembly level on a complex program (e.g. JVM). I think it coredumped on average every 5 minutes as I tried to step through things or set breakpoints.

I know my way around GDB, but only as a C debugger. Haven't really used it for Assembly.

  (gdb) help si
  Step one instruction exactly.

  (gdb) help ni
  Step one instruction, but proceed through subroutine calls.

  (gdb) help info registers
  List of integer registers and their contents, for selected stack frame.
  Register name as argument means describe only that register.

  (gdb) layout reg # to enable view of registers in split screen

Also, you can use register names in expressions. e.g. p $r11

All of this is applicable when debugging a C program as well.

`layout reg` Did exactly what I wanted. Thank-you so much!

Yes, and there is an appendix on gdb in the Bartlett book which will get OP started.

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