[Lazarus] Status of GDB and Lazarus/FPC debugging threaded apps

[Andrew Brunner]

Debugging under Linux (Ubuntu) is the largest development pain, and
has persisted since I started cross platform development with
FPC/Lazarus.  I was wondering what if anything could be done to get a
bug report together and submit something to either GDB or X.org, or
identify the source of the problem and resolve it so we can debug
without having to restart the desktop manager.

Recently, main threaded debugging doesn't crash the gdm but threading
still does.  If I set a break point for a threaded method, I can step
two or three lines down/deep before the desktop manager hangs and I
have to open a terminal session with ctrl+alt+F2 and sudo service gdm
restart.

What would be involved in running the GDM under debugger and seeing
where in the world it crashed?  Is this too big of a task?

I noticed GDB has done some updating w/r/t FPC in the past and was
wondering whose responsibility this might fall on.  It seems to me
like this problem is way beyond the scope of Lazarus or FPC but I hope
with some noise we possibly could get some stability while debugging
threaded apps.

Anyone want to help?