0.3.0 (Released October 9th, 2026)

These are some of the highlights of drgn 0.3.0. See the GitHub release for the full release notes, including more improvements and bug fixes.

Hardening

The main focus of this release was hardening drgn against malformed or malicious inputs. drgn’s threat model is:

  • Debugging information (ELF, DWARF, etc.) is not trusted.

  • The target (e.g., core dump) is not trusted.

  • Python code executed and imported by the user is trusted (but we do our best to protect against misuse).

Many bugs that could be triggered by crafted inputs were fixed, including:

  • Memory safety bugs: buffer overflows, out-of-bounds reads, null pointer dereferences, use-after-frees, double-frees, and uninitialized memory reads.

  • Undefined behavior: integer overflows and invalid arithmetic operations.

  • Unbounded recursion on deeply nested or cyclic types and namespaces.

  • Missing error checks and memory leaks.

A number of similar bugs that could only be triggered by pathological Python code were also fixed.

Faster QEMU Guest Debugging

drgn 0.2.0 added support for debugging QEMU guests over the QEMU Machine Protocol (QMP) with --qemu/drgn.Program.set_qemu_qmp(). However, reading guest memory through QMP is very slow.

drgn now speeds this up substantially by finding the QEMU process and reading guest memory directly from it as long as:

  1. The QMP connection is over a Unix domain socket, and

  2. drgn has permission to read the QEMU process’s memory (PTRACE_MODE_ATTACH_REALCREDS; see ptrace(2)).

Linux 7.2 and 7.3 Support

This release contains several updates to handle changes in Linux 7.2 and 7.3.

A change in Linux 7.2 broke the crash irq command. This error is fixed in this release:

_drgn.ObjectNotFoundError: could not find 'nr_irqs'

The new irq_get_nr_irqs() helper gets the number of IRQs on any kernel version.

A change in Linux 7.3 broke path_lookup() so that lookups fail when using the default root directory.

A change in Linux 7.3 made cfs_rq_for_each_entity() return every task at depth 0 and no task groups.

A change in Linux 7.3 made tools/fsrefs.py silently stop checking binfmt_misc.

These are fixed in this release.