Have you ever had to debug a Qt program running on a different computer?  There are a few special things that you must do in Qt Creator in order to properly get all of the debug information out from the device.

In my case, I’m debugging a Qt program running on an ARM processor, while debugging through my x86 computer.

First of all, you will need a root filesystem on your local computer that matches what is installed on your board.  See my guide on cross-compling Qt for ARM for information on how to use qemu-debootstrap to create a new rootfilesystem.  Alternatively, this should also work with any other filesystem that you create(e.g. through yocto).

Now that you have your root filesystem, here’s how to setup Qt Creator correctly:

1. (optional) install the qt sources.  On Debian, you can easily do this with:

   $ apt-get source qt5-default

2. (optional) Once you have the Qt sources, go to Tools -> Options -> Debugger and click ‘Add Qt sources’ at the bottom and add the source path for Qt.  The source path should be /var/tmp/qt-src, the target path should be the directory in which you executed the apt-get source line above, for example it may be /home/username/qt/qtbase-opensource-src-5.3.2+dfsg/src
3. Under Tools -> Options -> Debugger, go to the GDB tab and add these additional startup commands:

   set sysroot /path/to/rootfs
   set debug-file-directory /path/to/rootfs/usr/lib/debug

4. Install the debug symbols in your rootfs:

   $ sudo chroot /path/to/rootfs
   # apt-get install qtbase5-dbg

5. Go to Window -> Views -> Debugger log.  This will open up a new panel in Qt Creator that gives you the output from GDB.
6. Run the program with GDB through Qt Creator as you would normally.
7. When you hit a breakpoint or encounter an exception in the program, send the command ‘sharedlibrary’ to GDB.  This will load the shared libraries, but it will not update your stack trace immediately.  Either switch threads, or through the program for the stack trace to be updated in the GDB view.

You should now have a fully functioning remote debugging system.