Reattaching gdb to a running nRF51822

[Eliot Stock]

I have a board built which is a tracking device with a GPS and GSM modem. I'm beginning field testing and have been flashing it with a Segger then disconnecting the Segger and wandering around outside with the device, using some debug LEDs to see a bit of what's going on in my code. I now want to be able to reattach the Segger and connect gdb to see the state of some variables without resetting the Nordic.

Is this possible? My current .gdbinit looks like this:

target remote localhost:2331 load mon reset break main set print elements 0

Obviously I don't want 'mon reset' anymore. But even after 'load' I seem to be in the reset handler and all previous state is lost. Without load, I can't print any variables.

[Eliot Stock]

My mistake here was that I was stopping the GDB server and client before going into the field. Turns out if you simply leave them running on the host and physically disconnect the target from the Segger, when you reconnect it the GDB client and server pick up the session again.

[Charles Manning]

The "load" is needed because it loads the symbols, but it also has the impact of loading the code.

I would expect you can just use:

symbol-file <filename>

to load the symbols (and thus make the variables sensible).