Sign up ×

I am using my 2010 i7 MacBook Pro to debug some Linux programs; but I already have a Windows partition and it would be inconvenient to create another partition for Linux, so I am using a virtual machine with VMware Fusion 3.

However, it appears that I cannot set hardware breakpoints with the hbreak command from GDB inside the virtual machine, and there are times where I would rather have them. However, it does work from the host operating system, so I assume that this is a limitation of Fusion 3.

Which virtualization programs will support hardware breakpoints? Commercial products (including VMware Fusion 4) are not out of question.

share|improve this question

1 Answer 1

up vote 1 down vote accepted

Actually, VMware Fusion does support hardware-assisted breakpoints. However, gdb has trouble creating them while the program is not running (which was my issue; you can issue break commands even when the program is off, but you need it to be running for hbreak to work, or something along these lines).

share|improve this answer

Your Answer


