AMD's Work On Upstreaming AMDGPU/ROCm Debugging Support Into GDB

The AMD ROCm Debugger "ROCgdb" is maintained as a fork of the GNU Debugger (GDB) with support added for the heterogeneous debugging of the ROCm compute platform. ROCgdb works well and is distributed as part of the ROCM stack. The good news is that AMD is also working on getting this AMDGPU/ROCm debug support added into the upstream GDB debugger.

AMD engineer Lancelot SIX spoke at FOSDEM on Saturday in Brussels around GDB and AMD's ROCgdb downstream. Lancelot covered the current ROCgdb features/status and reaffirmed their plans on upstreaming the support.

There's no immediate timeline for having it all upstreamed in GDB but it's an ongoing progress and also depends on collaboration with other GDB stakeholders.

It remains to be seen if upstream GDB will ever get to the point of effectively deprecating ROCgdb or if there will always be a patch queue with some elements not appropriate for upstream, new features being still developed by AMD, etc, just as AMD continues maintaining AOMP as their Radeon OpenMP offloading compiler downstream of LLVM/Clang, among other downstream projects.

Those wishing to learn more about the ROCgdb effort and the GDB upstreaming can find the FOSDEM 2024 presentation details at FOSDEM.org.