How to solve "ptrace operation not permitted" when trying to attach GDB to a process?
This is due to kernel hardening in Linux; you can disable this behavior by echo 0 > /proc/sys/kernel/yama/ptrace_scope or by modifying it in /etc/sysctl.d/10-ptrace.conf
See also this article about it in Fedora 22 (with links to the documentation) and this comment thread about Ubuntu and .
I would like to add that I needed --security-opt apparmor=unconfined along with the options that @wisbucky mentioned. This was on Ubuntu 18.04 (both Docker client and host). Therefore, the full invocation for enabling gdb debugging within a container is:
docker run --cap-add=SYS_PTRACE --security-opt seccomp=unconfined --security-opt apparmor=unconfined