Typically the condition testing for a conditional is done inside the debugger, not inside the patched code. The reason for this is that the conditions can be quite complex, and require debug symbol resolution. And this takes up a lot of space.<p>The issue of space is actually a bit subtle. Imagine you have something like (assuming 4 byte fixed width instructions, which is the case on ARM):<p><pre><code>   0000 instruction 1
   0004 instruction 2
   0008 instruction 3
   000c jmp 0004
</code></pre>
Breakpoint instructions are generally designed so that they only take up one instruction&#x27;s worth of space. On x86, the opcode is just &quot;0xCC&quot;. Once you start adding in more complex code, you will necessarily use more instructions. Now, suppose your new breakpoint takes up two instructions (bytes 0-8). When the jump at 000c takes place, it will jump into the second of your two instructions, which will probably not do anything good (on x86 this is even worse because you may jump into the middle of an instruction!)<p>There&#x27;s also the practical issue – if you put the conditional test in the patched code, you would need to basically bundle a compiler with gdb so that it could compile the conditional testing code in order to create the patch.