Bare-metal debugging¤

When debugging an embedded device, or any other process with MMIO peripherals for that matter, the debugger should not read nor write certain regions of memory as doing so may cause unwanted side-effects (including changing the CPU state and registers).

In most cases, it is impossible for the debugger to detect which regions of memory are safe to read/write, and which ones aren't, and it should thus avoid touching any memory unless explicitly allowed to by the user.

To prevent Pwndbg from wreaking havoc in the address space, you may set these options in your .gdbinit when doing debugging on such targets:

set remotetimeout 20
set auto-explore-pages no
set auto-explore-auxv no
set auto-explore-stack no
# disable the stack
set context-sections regs disasm code backtrace expressions threads heap_tracker
set dereference-limit 0