warning: Error disabling address space randomization: Operation not permitted

what have i done wrong (or didn't do) that gdb is not working properly for me?

root@6be3d60ab7c6:/# cat minimal.c 
int main()
{
  int i = 1337;
  return 0;
}
root@6be3d60ab7c6:/# gcc -g minimal.c -o minimal
root@6be3d60ab7c6:/# gdb minimal
GNU gdb (Ubuntu 7.7.1-0ubuntu5~14.04.2) 7.7.1
.
.
.
Reading symbols from minimal...done.
(gdb) break main
Breakpoint 1 at 0x4004f1: file minimal.c, line 3.
(gdb) run
Starting program: /minimal 
warning: Error disabling address space randomization: Operation not permitted
During startup program exited normally.
(gdb) 
(gdb) print i   
No symbol "i" in current context.

Solution 1:

If you're using Docker, you probably need the --security-opt seccomp=unconfined option (as well as enabling ptrace):

docker run --cap-add=SYS_PTRACE --security-opt seccomp=unconfined

Solution 2:

For whatever reason, your user account doesn't have permission to disable the kernel's address space layout randomisation for this process. By default, gdb turns this off because it makes some sorts of debugging easier (in particular, it means the address of stack objects will be the same each time you run your program). Read more here.

You can work around this problem by disabling this feature of gdb with set disable-randomization off.

As for getting your user the permission needed to disable ASLR, it probably boils down to having write permission to /proc/sys/kernel/randomize_va_space. Read more here.