We've got this legacy Fortran code running on a board with an A9 processor, and I've noticed some funny behavior when using gdb. Threads continue to run when it is in all-stop mode, and it seems gdb crashes when you switch it to non-stop mode. It also can't do watchpoints on symbols in the Fortran code, not sure if that's due to the port or the binaries not belonging to the same toolchain. You can set a watchpoint on the address cast as a C type, however.
We've got toolchain binaries from CodeSourcery installed to the stage directory during the rootfs build, then as part of our application build Linaro binaries overwrite some of the libraries in the targetroot. The libraries that are overwritten are (some of?) the only ones needed by the application and the ones it is linked against (libstdc++, libgfortran, and libpthread).
Using either gdb from CodeSourcery or Linaro seems to function equivalently, though I didn't try setting hardware assisted watchpoints with the Linaro compiler. Neither seem to be configured to work outside the documented behavior, which unless I'm mistaken what I've observed runs counter to it.
So is this fine? I mean, it runs, but if gdb is at least slightly broken I don't know what other utilities would be. I'd like to see about making use of Eclipse+Photran and TCF Agent, and I was looking into where the CodeSourcery toolchain came from, which led me to Yocto. I've been trying some builds with Yocto at home, and I'm wondering if it's worth my time to bring in a VM with all of this set up to try run our application with the toolchain built into the rootfs from the ground up.
Probably too late to switch anything over but if I can just have a smoother environment under which to work then I can just toss the source back into our current solution when it's time to turn in a fix.