Instead, this division is useful for understanding how the minor subsystems should fit together. For instance, you can look at the types of variables, and evaluate many kinds of expressions. Operations such as disassembly, stack frame crawls, and register display, are able to work with no symbolic info at all. In some cases, such as disassembly, GDB will use symbolic info to present addresses relative to symbols rather than as raw numbers, but it will work either way. 2.3 Configurations Host refers to attributes of the system where GDB runs.
Target refers to the system where the program being debugged executes.
In most cases they are the same machine, in which case a third type of Native attributes come into play. Defines and include files needed to build on the host are host support. Examples are tty support, system defined types, host byte order, host float format. Defines and information needed to handle the target format are target dependent. Examples are the stack frame format, instruction set, breakpoint instruction, registers, and how to set up and tear down the stack to call a function.