GDB

GNU Debuger is a portable debug utility that can run/attach to other processes and inspect but also control how these processes (and their children) are accessing the system memory and how the code ends up in and interacts with the hardware registers. The tool can understand assembly and higher level languages and in general is very good for tracing application execution in real time.

Project Home: There are multiple homes for this project, see the Get Involved section.

Downloads & Documentation

Fork VersionBased on Upstream VersionTargetReference SpecDownload
df929d4 (codasip-cheri-riscv)
2025-18-02		v14.1
2023-12-03		riscv64c, aarch64cCHERI RISC-V RVYSource
a686ecf (cheri-14)
2025-11-05		v14.1
2023-12-03		riscv64c, aarch64cCHERI RISC-V ISAv9, MorelloSource
70d0d9f0 (morello-binutils-gdb-master)
2023-12-06		v11.0.5
2020-10-20		aarch64cMorelloSource
There are no pre-built binaries or versioned releases, users must build from source.

Project Status

There are three repositories for GDB, each historically adding support for different architectures, the first development work was done for the University of Cambridge RISC-V architecture (currently at ISAv9) at https://github.com/CTSRD-CHERI/gdb and is currently at version 14.1 of GDB.
The cheri-14 branch supports RISC-V ISAv9 userspace CheriBSD and bare-metal binaries and Morello user space for bare-metal, CheriBSD and Linux. The cheri-14-kgdb branch also supports CheriBSD kernel for both RISC-V and Morello. This repository replaced the initial and canonical GBD Morello from ARM which is now very old (version 11.0.5).

The GDB for Morello at https://git.morello-project.org/morello/binutils-gdb lives in a vendor branch upstream and as already mentioned is at version 11.0.5, this project was based of an older implementation of GDB from the CTSRD-CHERI repository.

The GDB hosted at the Cherry Aliance repository https://github.com/CHERI-Alliance/gdb is really a fork off the UoC repository from October 2024 and Codasip has added support for the RISC-V RVY architecture along with bug fixes on top of the previous work at UoC, it is also at version 14.1.

Building from Source

Please keep an eye out for our blog as we will soon share instructions for building from source.

Get Involved

Development for this project happens in the following places:

There are no mailing lists associated with this project.

There is a dedicated Slack channel at the CHERI CPU Slack in the #debuggers channel.

There are no regular meetings associated with this project.

Vulnerability Disclosure

Please report security vulnerabilities relating to GDB to support@thecapablehub.org.

Something missing, incorrect?

This page was last updated on 2nd February 2026. Please let us know of any corrections via support@thecapablehub.org, alternatively raise a GitHub pull request in our repo.