[Lldb-commits] [PATCH] Implement a framework for debugging on Windows.

[Zachary Turner]

It's also worth pointing out that all of the code here should be reusable
if / when Windows switches to llgs.

On Thu Oct 30 2014 at 1:20:02 PM Zachary Turner <zturner at google.com> wrote:

> Hi clayborg, jingham, rnk, majnemer, scottmg,
>
> Note: All of this is Windows specific, and I'm kind of the only person
> working on this.  So I'm not really sure who should review this.  I'm
> adding Jim and Greg, but feel free to ignore if you don't care about this.
> Also adding a few Windows people from here, although if ultimately nobody
> cares enough to review this, since it is entirely Windows specific, I will
> just go in with it.
>
>
> This implements ProcessWindows::DoLaunch() in such a way that a connection
> is created between LLDB and the Windows kernel that allows us to obtain
> notifications of interesting things that happen in an inferior process on
> Windows.
>
> Put another way, this implements the "ptrace" part of debugging for
> Windows processes.
>
> This is complicated by some technical restrictions surrounding how
> processes are monitored for debug events on Windows.  Specifically:
>
> 1) LLDB's generic process launching code expects that launching a process
> and monitoring a process can be treated as two distinct operations.  It is
> possible to split this into two separate operations on Windows, but the
> code would be very cumbersome, and it is much simpler to allow the
> monitoring and launching to occur as one high level operation.  This is
> largely because:
>
> 2) In Windows, the core debug loop (i.e. the ptrace equivalent) must
> happen on the same thread that spawns the process, and this is a loop that
> ultimately blocks until the process dies.  Therefore, we cannot spawn the
> inferior process on LLDB's main thread, which presents a complication for
> the design that LLDB currently uses which expects launching a process to be
> a synchronous operation, after which monitoring can begin.
>
> The solution to these problems implemented here is for ProcessWindows to
> completely circumvent Host::LaunchProcess.  When ProcessWindows is
> initialized at program startup, we create a single background thread.  This
> background thread does two things:
>
> a) Pump an application-specific message queue and wait for messages from
> the main thread that tell it to do things (e.g. launching processes,
> attaching to processes etc).
> b) When we are actively debugging processes (as a result of messages
> received by step a described above), also pump Windows' message queue for
> events related to processes we're debugging.
>
> http://reviews.llvm.org/D6037
>
> Files:
>   include/lldb/Host/Predicate.h
>   source/Plugins/Process/Windows/CMakeLists.txt
>   source/Plugins/Process/Windows/DebugMonitorMessageResults.cpp
>   source/Plugins/Process/Windows/DebugMonitorMessageResults.h
>   source/Plugins/Process/Windows/DebugMonitorMessages.cpp
>   source/Plugins/Process/Windows/DebugMonitorMessages.h
>   source/Plugins/Process/Windows/DebugProcessLauncher.cpp
>   source/Plugins/Process/Windows/DebugProcessLauncher.h
>   source/Plugins/Process/Windows/DebugStatusMonitorThread.cpp
>   source/Plugins/Process/Windows/DebugStatusMonitorThread.h
>   source/Plugins/Process/Windows/ProcessWindows.cpp
>   source/Plugins/Process/Windows/ProcessWindows.h
>
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