Remote debugging on Blackberry devices
Remote debugging on BlackBerry devices
This page is a how-to on how to setup remote debugging for BlackBerry devices with the command-line tools. Currently the instructions are for Linux and Mac, but should be similar on Windows.
Please do not miss the the GDB manual [gnu.org] to learn how to use GDB, the command-line debugger.
Note that Qt Creator supports remote debugging for BlackBerry devices as well, see this article for details. Qt Creator uses the same steps as outlined below, just wraps it into its IDE.
Pre-requisites
- Allow SSH connections to your BlackBerry device. See the BlackBerry Hints and Tips article for more details about this.
- Compile your app in the debug mode
Deploying the application
The deployment process is the same as for just testing the application the device:
For PlayBook, see the steps described here [qt.io]
Launching the application
As next, you should launch the app on the device and stop it for debugging.
blackberry-deploy<code> will do this for you:
This will stop the execution early on (immediately after the process has been spawned) and wait for the debugger to attach and tell it to continue.
The PID is in the output from blackberry-deploy listed as result::<pid>. You will need this <pid> below to attach to the process.
Attach and setup the debugger
Execute
In the GDB shell, run
With the last command from the above block, the app should stop in in the first call in main().
Note:
$HOST_QTDIR<code> is a path on the development host machine pointing to the root folder of the Qt build for the <span class="caps">ARM</span> target, and '''not''' on the device. <code>$BBNDK<code> refers to the folder where the BlackBerry <span class="caps">NDK</span> is installed. It can contain multiple versions of target and host files. This is why you have to replace <version> with a value which is valid for your environment.
If versions of the target libs on the host do not match those on the target, gdb might fail to load symbols from shared libraries. You can check the status of loaded shared libraries by
You can enforce reloading of the shared libraries by:
TBD: add information how to download a runtime matching the device libraries.
References
- See the Using GDB [qnx.com] article in the QNX documentation