The FreeBSD kernel can be debugged with the ddb(4) interactive kernel debugger. Although the latest production release of FreeBSD (7.1 at the time of this writing) adds some very useful features, ddb is still lacking the flexibility of gdb.

The FreeBSD developer’s handbook has a section on kernel debugging using remote gdb, but it is not directly applicable to VMware-based installations. The solution is to use VMware’s feature of creating virtual serial ports as named pipes to emulate a serial connection between two FreeBSD virtual machines.