The 80386 brings to Intel's line of microprocessors significant advances in debugging power. The single-step exception and breakpoint exception of previous processors are still available in the 80386, but the principal debugging support takes the form of debug registers. The debug registers support both instruction breakpoints and data breakpoints. Data breakpoints are an important innovation that can save hours of debugging time by pinpointing, for example, exactly when a data structure is being overwritten. The breakpoint registers also eliminate the complexities associated with writing a breakpoint instruction into a code segment (requires a data-segment alias for the code segment) or a code segment shared by multiple tasks (the breakpoint exception can occur in the context of any of the tasks). Breakpoints can even be set in code contained in ROM.
12.1 Debugging Features of the Architecture
12.2 Debug Registers
12.3 Debug Exceptions
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12.1 Debugging Features of the Architecture