Debugging UEFI applications with GDB

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TODO - this information was copied from the old UEFI article and needs to be rewritten.


There are some advices for emulation running:

  • Use "-serial" option to have serial console available for the virtual machine. You will have console logs in your terminal and a possibility to use simple ports writing to output debug tracing to serial console.
  • Use "-s" option to enable built-in GDB stab which will wait for connection on TCP port 1234.

Launch Qemu providing path to the directory where your firmware binaries are located:

$PREFIX/bin/qemu-system-x86_64 -L $PREFIX/share/qemu/myOS -bios OVMF.fd -m 768 -cpu kvm64 \
    -vga cirrus -monitor stdio -serial tcp::666,server -s -hdb $PREFIX/share/qemu/myOS/myOS.disk -enable-kvm

Qemu will start and wait for incoming connection to serial console. In the example above it waits on TCP port 666. You can use, for example, socat utility to connect:

socat -,raw,echo=0 tcp4:localhost:666

Once connected the emulation will start. You can use EFI shell command to navigate through filesystems, output system information or launch your application. It has help for all commands so refer to it for details.

If you're using libvirt, the following can be added to the <domain> section of an XML config file in /etc/libvirt/qemu/ to enable the gdb server for a VM:

  <qemu:commandline>
    <qemu:arg value='-s'/>
  </qemu:commandline>

Sample application

The next important question is the application debugging. The first moment is that the EFI application should be stopped at some point and wait for debugger. The simplest way to do this is to insert some endless loop in your application. The loop can be enclosed in the block which is executed, for example, when your application receives "--debug" option in its arguments. Let's assume you have inserted such code:

EFI_STATUS
efi_main (EFI_HANDLE image, EFI_SYSTEM_TABLE *systab)
{
    EFI_LOADED_IMAGE *loaded_image = NULL;
    EFI_STATUS status;
 
    InitializeLib(image, systab);
    status = uefi_call_wrapper(systab->BootServices->HandleProtocol,
                               3,
                              image,
                              &LoadedImageProtocol,
                              (void **)&loaded_image);
    if (EFI_ERROR(status)) {
        Print(L"handleprotocol: %r\n", status);
    }
 
    Print(L"Image base: 0x%lx\n", loaded_image->ImageBase);
 
    int wait = 1;
    while (wait) {
        __asm__ __volatile__("pause");
    }
 
    return EFI_SUCCESS;
}

When this code will be executed "pause" instruction will be executed in the loop.

The next thing required for GDB is executable image with symbols. If you carefully examined build log and Makefiles you should note that when EFI executable is created from ELF shared object file only limited set of sections are copied to the resulted image:

.text .sdata .data .dynamic .dynsym .rel .rela .reloc

For having debug symbols we need additionally these sections (in case you have compiled files with "-ggdb" option):

.debug_info .debug_abbrev .debug_loc .debug_aranges .debug_line .debug_macinfo .debug_str

But if you create EFI binary which additionally contains these sections the EFI firmware will be unable to launch it. Fortunately, we do not need the file with debug symbols on the target machine since we will use remote debugging anyway. So what you need is to create two EFI binaries - one with only required sections to upload it to target system and another one with debug symbols to use it with GDB. Actually you just need to run objcopy utility twice with different set of sections to copy and different output files. See Makefile example there.

Now you can launch GDB. You need to specify some file to use as the target binary - you can specify EFI binary with debug symbols but it will have no sense for debugging because the image will be relocated to different address. Note that in the example code above the actual image base address is output. It is required to properly load file with symbols. Let's say after you have launched your application it provided this output:

Image base: 0x2EE30000

So now you need to start GDB, connect to local TCP port 1234 where Qemu is waiting for GDB connection and load image with symbols to relocated address. We need to specify relocated addresses for .text and .data sections. Their addresses in non-relocated binary should be added to image base which is provided in the output above:

# gdb myOS.efi 
GNU gdb (GDB) 7.3
Copyright (C) 2011 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
License GPLv3+: GNU GPL version 3 or later <http://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html>
This is free software: you are free to change and redistribute it.
There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.  Type "show copying"
and "show warranty" for details.
This GDB was configured as "x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu".
For bug reporting instructions, please see:
<http://www.gnu.org/software/gdb/bugs/>...
Reading symbols from /home/John/myOS/source/kernel/boot/build/DEBUG/myOS.efi...(no debugging symbols found)...done.
(gdb) info files 
Symbols from "/home/John/myOS/source/kernel/boot/build/DEBUG/myOS.efi".
Local exec file:
	`/home/John/myOS/source/kernel/boot/build/DEBUG/myOS.efi', file type pei-x86-64.
	Entry point: 0x3000
	0x0000000000003000 - 0x000000000000b9ce is .text
	0x000000000000b9ce - 0x000000000000b9d8 is .reloc
	0x000000000000c000 - 0x000000000000e148 is .data
	0x000000000000f000 - 0x000000000000f0f0 is .dynamic
	0x0000000000010000 - 0x0000000000011098 is .rela
	0x0000000000012000 - 0x0000000000013788 is .dynsym
(gdb) file
No executable file now.
No symbol file now.
(gdb) add-symbol-file debug.myOS.efi 0x2EE33000 -s .data 0x2EE3c000
add symbol table from file "debug.myOS.efi" at
	.text_addr = 0x2ee33000
	.data_addr = 0x2ee3c000
(y or n) y
Reading symbols from /home/John/myOS/source/kernel/boot/build/DEBUG/debug.myOS.efi...done.
(gdb) set architecture i386:x86-64:intel
The target architecture is assumed to be i386:x86-64:intel
(gdb) target remote :1234
Remote debugging using :1234
WaitDebugger () at loader/main.c:80
80	    while (wait) {
(gdb) set variable wait = 0

We need to unload executable binary by "file" command after sections layout is displayed because otherwise its symbols will override debug symbols loaded by "add-symbol-file" command (at least for data section). You do not need to load it each time because sections addresses will change only after next recompilation. Alternatively "objdump" utility can be used to dump sections. As you can see after setup is done you can normally debug your application using whole power of the GDB. Set your "wait" variable to zero and you will exit from endless loop. Set breakpoints/watchpoints, continue execution, enjoy debugging!

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