Check GDB Build Configuration Options

Examining how GDB was configured during compilation can provide valuable information when troubleshooting debugger behavior, comparing installations, or verifying available capabilities. The configuration output includes the target architecture, enabled libraries, installation directories, and other compile-time settings. This tutorial explains how to check GDB build configuration options.

The build configuration can be displayed by using --configuration, which prints the configuration options that were supplied when GDB was built.

gdb --configuration

A typical result may look like:

This GDB was configured as follows:
   configure --host=x86_64-linux-gnu --target=x86_64-linux-gnu
         --with-auto-load-dir=$debugdir:$datadir/auto-load
         --with-auto-load-safe-path=$debugdir:$datadir/auto-load
         --with-expat
         --with-gdb-datadir=/usr/share/gdb (relocatable)
         --with-jit-reader-dir=/usr/lib/gdb (relocatable)
         --without-libunwind-ia64
         --with-lzma
         --with-babeltrace
         --with-intel-pt
...

The output lists the options that were passed to the configure script before GDB was compiled.