The __flash qualifier is part of the named address spaces for AVR [1]. It
allows putting read-only data in the flash memory, normally reserved for
code.
When used together with a pointer, the DW_AT_address_class attribute is set
to 1 and allows GDB to detect that when it will be dereferenced, the data
will be loaded from the flash memory (with the LPM instruction).
We can now properly debug the following code:
~~~
const __flash char data_in_flash = 0xab;
int
main (void)
{
const __flash char *pointer_to_flash = &data_in_flash;
}
~~~