On Monday 31 October 2011 22:36:08 Peter Kümmel wrote: > On 30.10.2011 13:21, Volker Krause wrote: > > Hi! > > > > During the Qt Dev Days in Munich last week we (KDAB) released a new Free > > Software introspection/debugging tool for Qt applications, called > > GammaRay: > > https://github.com/KDAB/GammaRay > > > > It hooks itself into a Qt application (at start-up or at runtime) using a > > variety of methods (ranging from assembler hacks to (ab)using Qt plug-ins) > > and uses the Qt meta object system for introspecting object, properties, > > signals, slots, signal/slot connections, etc. Nothing really new until > > here, tools like Qt Inspector or KSpy can do this already. On top of that > > GammaRay adds a bunch of higher level tools though, for example: > > > > - QWidget layout overlay, similar to designer > > - Inspecting a QGraphicsScene and various details of QGraphicsItems > > (visualizing shapes, bounding rects, transformation origins, etc) > > - Looking at the full (proxy) model hierarchy and all intermediate results > > in there > > - a live updating QStateMachine visualization > > - attaching of QScriptEngineDebugger and QWebInspector to the > > corresponding > > objects in the application > > - a QTextDocument document object model viewer > > > > Additionally, GammaRay has a plug-in interface for adding new tools, say a > > KJob tracker. > > > > GammaRay works on Linux, Mac and Windows (MSVC only so far), it needs to > > be > > compiled against the same Qt version used by the application you are about > > to debug though. There's also a Qt Creator plug-in for it > > (https://github.com/KDAB/KDAB-Creator). > > > > Some screenshots can be found here: http://www.kdab.com/gammaray > > > > GammaRay was originally developed in support for the Kontact Touch > > project, > > back when there wasn't a QML debugger yet. The proxy model debugger also > > proved quite helpful on KMail, maybe it can help some of you as well :) > > > > Needless to say that contributions are very much welcome. > > > > regards > > Volker > > Congratulation for this very nice tool! > > I've also tried to attach to console apps without success. > Then I realized that you use the hijacked process to show > the GammaRay mainwindow which is not possible in a > QCoreApplication executable. > > So I wonder how difficult it would be to run GammaRay in a > different process? Then an IPC mechanism is needed for all > the information. Would this be fast enough? Do you plan > to add this in future?
I'd love to have that, for console apps, remote debugging on an embedded
system, and for less interference with the debugged process :)
You can probably get a large amount of the features by having some kind of
network transparent QAbstractItemModel adapter. But some feature need direct
memory access, like rendering of a second QGraphicsScene view, unless you want
to send pixmaps over IPC.
> Is there a single point where all the information of
> the target process goes through or is it all over the place?
> I assume at least each plugin pulls information by itself.
Most of it goes through probe.cpp and the object models provided by it,
however all the plug-ins access raw QObject pointers they retrieve from those
models (and thus are bound to the same process).
> And how much does the current code depend on x86/64?
> Would it be hard to support PPC?
There are two injectors that are very architecture specific ("windll" on
Windows/MSVC and "preload" on Mac), they assume a specific layout in memory
and rewrite assembly code to intercept function calls.
All other injectors should be architecture independent ("preload" on Linux,
"gdb" on any Unix and "style" everywhere), but I don't think they have been
tested yet on non-x86 either.
Probably something I should document in the wiki...
regards
Volker
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