What is the difference between hardware and software breakpoints?

Question

What is the difference between hardware and software breakpoints?

Are hardware breakpoints are said to be faster than software breakpoints, if yes then how, and also

Answer 1

You can go through GDB internals, its very well explains the HW and SW breakpoints.

HW breakpoints are something that require support from MCU. The ARM controllers have special registers where you can write some address space, whenever PC (program counter) == sp register CPU halts. Jtag is usually required to write into those special registers.

SW break points are implemented in GDB is by inserting a trap, or illegal divide, or some other instruction that will cause an exception, and then when it’s encountered, gdb will take the exception and stop the program. When the user says to continue, gdb will restore the original instruction, single-step, re-insert the trap, and continue on.

There are a lot of advantages in using HW debuggers over SW debuggers especially if you are dealing with interrupts and memory bus devices. AFAIK interrupts cannot be debugged with software debuggers.