Hi Greg,

Is there any reason not to move the currently hard-coded ARM register 
information into an XML file once that support is in place?

I'd like to see some mechanism where we'll attempt to choose a register 
definition file based on the target architecture, but of course having the 
ability to override the selected file with a settings variable would be 
desirable.

-Andy

-----Original Message-----
From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On 
Behalf Of Greg Clayton
Sent: Thursday, September 05, 2013 11:26 AM
To: Abid, Hafiz
Cc: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [lldb-dev] LLDB and gdbserver


On Sep 5, 2013, at 9:16 AM, Abid, Hafiz <[email protected]> wrote:

> I was able to make the LLDB work with gdbserver. Running, stopping, source 
> stepping were working ok. I needed to patch 2 areas to make it work. I would 
> like comments on those changes before I can get them ready for submission.
> 
> If dynamic register info is not available then GDBRemoteRegisterContext is 
> relying on hardcoded registers for ARM. I have to added similar hard-coded 
> registers for x86_64. Would it make any sense if we keep 
> GDBRemoteRegisterContext for reading/writing the register packets only. The 
> task of translating those packets should be left to some higher level 
> classes. Perhaps something like GDBRemoteRegisterContext_arm, 
> GDBRemoteRegisterContext_x86_64 etc. Or for the time being, hardcoding is 
> considered ok.

The only hard coded registers should be for ARM as this was needed for legacy 
iOS support. Any new registers should use a new plugin setting that supplies an 
XML file that describes the registers. The setting should be something like:

(lldb) settings set plugin.process.gdb-remote.register-definition-file 
/path/to/registers.xml

The XML register description should supply the same information as the 
qRegisterInfo packet for all registers. Then the GDBRemoteDynamicRegisterInfo 
class will need to be able to set itself up using an XML file. Another way to 
do this would be to supply a python file. We have Python bridging objects 
available where you could easily make a new python callback where a python 
dictionary could be returned. Python might also be more useful because you 
could create classes that know the common register numbers for certain 
architectures and ABIs...

So the flow would be:
- debugging starts with debugserver
- we stop for the first time and "qRegisterInfo0" packet is sent, and the 
unsupported response of "$#00" is returned.
- we grab the value of the "plugin.process.gdb-remote.register-definition-file" 
setting, and if it is set, we parse that file
- else fallback to hard coded registers. 

So I would avoid adding anymore hard coded registers to LLDB otherwise we will 
end up with a mess in LLDB with all the different gdb servers that we can 
attach to.

> It seems that debugserver decrements the pc after stopping on breakpoint. To 
> find the stop reason, code in ProcessGDBRemote::SetThreadStopInfo() checks 
> for breakpoint on pc. But gdbserver does not decrement the pc in this case. I 
> had to duplicate the above check for (pc - 1) and then decrement the pc 
> accordingly. I was wondering if there is some good way to distinguish if I am 
> connected to debugserver or gdbserver. Can I make use of some of the new 
> packets added by LLDB or perhaps add some option in the gdb-remote command?

I would modify the qHostInfo to return a new key/value pair like: 
"adjusts_breakpoint_pc:1;" or "adjusts_breakpoint_pc:0;" so we know for certain 
architectures if we need to manually adjust the PC. Then we use a LazyBool 
instance variable in GDBRemoteCommunicationClient to detect this setting via 
the qHostInfo packet. If the "adjusts_breakpoint_pc" key/value isn't specified 
in the qHostInfo packet, or if the qHostInfo packet isn't supported, we should 
fall back to a setting:

(lldb) settings set plugin.process.gdb-remote.adjust-breakpoint-pc true
(lldb) settings set plugin.process.gdb-remote.adjust-breakpoint-pc false


So with all settings when using GDB server, we try to detect things dynamically 
(registers and other settings like the adjust breakpoint PC), and if that 
fails, we fall back to manual settings.

Greg
_______________________________________________
lldb-dev mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.cs.uiuc.edu/mailman/listinfo/lldb-dev

_______________________________________________
lldb-dev mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.cs.uiuc.edu/mailman/listinfo/lldb-dev

Reply via email to