Description
There are a few situations that will arise, while using the debugger, where things will need to be copied or rebased. These operations can take a very long time and, if you have a big enough binary, this can effectively render the debugger unusable.
Potentially relevant debugger issues:
- Debugger rebases the program without asking the user debugger#214
- Debugger takes an extraordinarily long time to become usable on large binaries debugger#483
There are multiple things we could do (or look into doing) that would address this, some of which may already be issues. I'm just making this one to track the overall problem so we can prioritize for some future release.
Example from a recent user in Slack:
After waiting for analysis to complete and launching the game in the debugger, BN performs a rebase (ASLR) and... restarts the whole analysis from scratch. The code at my breakpoint is no longer valid and the game sits on a black screen, barely able to start while BN uses most of the CPU to run the 15min analysis for the second time. In contrast, IDA needs ~10 seconds to adjust to the new image base and have the game up and running.
I would happily consider this issue closed once the above use-case is better supported, regardless of whatever implementation(s) happen to get us there.