As of 2018, this is a deprecated software project. The ROCm software team is working on a new GDB-based debugger that works with the ROCr Debug Agent to support debugging GPU kernels.

The ROCm-GDB repository includes the source code for ROCm-GDB. ROCm-GDB is a modified version of GDB 7.11 that supports debugging GPU kernels on Radeon Open Compute platforms (ROCm).

The ROCm-GDB repository includes

• A modified version of gdb-7.11 to support GPU debugging. Note the main ROCm specific files are located in gdb-7.11/gdb with the rocm-* prefix.
• The ROCm debug facilities library located in amd/HwDbgFacilities/. This library provides symbol processing for GPU kernels.

1. Clone the ROCm-GDB repository

• git clone https://github.com/RadeonOpenCompute/ROCm-GDB.git

2. The gdb build has been modified with new files and configure settings to enable GPU debugging. The scripts below should be run to compile gdb. The run_configure_rocm.sh script calls the GNU autotools configure with additional parameters. The run_configure_rocm.sh script will create the build directory to build the gdb executable in a out of source manner

• ./run_configure_rocm.sh debug

3. The run_configure_rocm.sh script also generates the run_make_rocm.sh which sets environment variables for the Make step

• ./run_make_rocm.sh

The run_make_rocm.sh script builds the gdb executable which will be located in build/gdb/

To run the ROCm debugger, you'd also need to get the ROCm GPU Debug SDK.

Before running the rocm debugger, the LD_LIBRARY_PATH should include paths to

• The ROCm GPU Debug Agent library built in the ROCm GPU Debug SDK (located in gpudebugsdk/lib/x86_64)
• The ROCm GPU Debugging library binary shippped with the ROCm GPU Debug SDK (located in gpudebugsdk/lib/x86_64)
• Before running ROCm-GDB, please update your .gdbinit file with text in gpudebugsdk/src/HSADebugAgent/gdbinit. The rocmConfigure function in the ~/.gdbinit sets up gdb internals for supporting GPU kernel debug.
• The gdb executable should be run from within the rocm-gdb-local script. The ROCm runtime requires certain environment variables to enable kernel debugging and this is set up by the rocm-gdb-local script.

./rocm-gdb-local < sample application>

• A brief tutorial on how to debug GPU applications using ROCm-GDB