[lldb-dev] Increasing support for other gdbservers

Aidan Dodds aidan at codeplay.com
Thu Apr 2 06:52:09 PDT 2015


gdbserver support is really something that fits well in the core of 
gdb-remote as any development efforts
in supporting lldb-gdbserver and gdbserver will benefit each other, 
which wouldn't be the case if gdbserver support
it pushed into a fringe python script.

I have had success building libxml2 from source on windows, which was my 
main concern, and the process was relatively painless.
I don't think it will be too much of a hassle to build lldb with xml 
support on windows, and likely free on unix systems.

Coupling python and gdbserver support sounds bad in the long term, so 
I'll continue in favor of libxml2.


On 01/04/2015 18:19, Colin Riley wrote:
> In my opinion, forcing python is worse.
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> From: Ted Woodward <mailto:ted.woodward at codeaurora.org>
> Sent: ‎01/‎04/‎2015 17:42
> To: 'Zachary Turner' <mailto:zturner at google.com>; 'Vince Harron' 
> <mailto:vince at nethacker.com>
> Cc: lldb-dev at cs.uiuc.edu <mailto:lldb-dev at cs.uiuc.edu>
> Subject: Re: [lldb-dev] Increasing support for other gdbservers
>
> But which is a worse dependency when we want to parse gdbserver’s xml 
> files – add a dependency to libxml2, or force python?
>
> *From:*Zachary Turner [mailto:zturner at google.com]
> *Sent:* Wednesday, April 01, 2015 10:37 AM
> *To:* Ted Woodward; Vince Harron
> *Cc:* lldb-dev at cs.uiuc.edu
> *Subject:* Re: [lldb-dev] Increasing support for other gdbservers
>
> You mean write python code to do xml parsing? I've done some work 
> lately to separate python from the rest of the codebase so that in 
> theory it can be replaced with an interpreter for a different 
> language. Plus there's already LLDB_DISABLE_PYTHON, and since the 
> functionality that the xml parser is needed for is not logically tied 
> to the python interpreter, it would be a shame to make them physically 
> tied.
>
> Plus clang already uses libxml2 so it makes some sense to remain 
> consistent
>
> On Wed, Apr 1, 2015 at 8:29 AM Ted Woodward 
> <ted.woodward at codeaurora.org <mailto:ted.woodward at codeaurora.org>> wrote:
>
>     Since you mentioned Python…a thought came to mind. Python includes
>     several XML parsers. I use minidom to parse the TLB and Pagetable
>     XML files that the Hexagon Simulator produces and Hexagon GDB
>     consumes. If we’re going to require a dependency, why not one that
>     we already use, and use a Python XML parser?
>
>     *From:*lldb-dev-bounces at cs.uiuc.edu
>     <mailto:lldb-dev-bounces at cs.uiuc.edu>
>     [mailto:lldb-dev-bounces at cs.uiuc.edu
>     <mailto:lldb-dev-bounces at cs.uiuc.edu>] *On Behalf Of *Vince Harron
>     *Sent:* Wednesday, April 01, 2015 2:46 AM
>     *To:* Zachary Turner
>
>
>     *Cc:* lldb-dev at cs.uiuc.edu <mailto:lldb-dev at cs.uiuc.edu>
>     *Subject:* Re: [lldb-dev] Increasing support for other gdbservers
>
>     I think I get it.  Objection withdrawn.
>
>     On Wed, Apr 1, 2015 at 12:44 AM, Vince Harron <vince at nethacker.com
>     <mailto:vince at nethacker.com>> wrote:
>
>         This is a pretty cool feature for people who want to use lldb
>         on windows against gdbserver
>
>         On Tue, Mar 31, 2015 at 5:57 PM, Zachary Turner
>         <zturner at google.com <mailto:zturner at google.com>> wrote:
>
>             I think uses of it would only need to be guarded if we
>             plan to use it in generic code. So yea, if all the code
>             that uses it goes into a file that isn't compiled on
>             windows anyway, then the problem becomes very simple
>
>             On Tue, Mar 31, 2015 at 5:41 PM Jason Molenda
>             <jmolenda at apple.com <mailto:jmolenda at apple.com>> wrote:
>
>                 fwiw on Mac OS X we use libxml2 over in
>                 Plugins/SymbolVendor/MacOSX/SymbolVendorMacOSX.cpp.
>                 That plugin's initialization is #ifdef __APPLE__ over
>                 in SystemInitializerFull.cpp; we don't have ifdef
>                 guard around the use of libxml2 in SymbolVendorMacOSX
>                 itself.
>
>
>                 > On Mar 31, 2015, at 4:18 PM, Vince Harron
>                 <vince at nethacker.com <mailto:vince at nethacker.com>> wrote:
>                 >
>                 > I really don't want LLDB to embed a copy of
>                 libxml2.  I think we should build it externally and
>                 reference it from LLDB.  Systems with package managers
>                 can get this trivially.  Windows can download and
>                 build all dependencies with one script.
>                 >
>                 > On Mar 31, 2015 2:10 PM, "Colin Riley"
>                 <colin at codeplay.com <mailto:colin at codeplay.com>> wrote:
>                 > I noticed that use in cmake also. FWIW, my primary
>                 LLDB platform is Windows, which is why we were using
>                 TinyXML2 for ease of prototyping. If libxml2 works on
>                 all the targets we will use it - I do worry about the
>                 usual issues you get with windows prebuilts. So source
>                 may still be required. We'll look into it.
>                 >
>                 > Colin
>                 >
>                 > On 31/03/2015 20:45, Zachary Turner wrote:
>                 >> There's already some stuff in the CMake to try to
>                 find libxml, but it's behind a Darwin specific branch
>                 in the CMake.  So I think what would need to happen is
>                 that we move this into a platform agnostic codepath,
>                 and then set a define like LLDB_HAVE_LIBXML2 in the
>                 code to a value that indicates whether it is present
>                 (search clang for CLANG_HAVE_LIBXML in *.* to see how
>                 this is done).  Then, in the code, we would need to
>                 put xml code behind a check for this define.
>                 >>
>                 >> On Tue, Mar 31, 2015 at 10:02 AM Zachary Turner
>                 <zturner at google.com <mailto:zturner at google.com>> wrote:
>                 >> A good rule of thumb for anything is that "Windows
>                 doesn't have it" and that holds true for libxml2 as
>                 well.  It appears that libxml2 does support Windows
>                 though (http://xmlsoft.org/downloads.html), it just
>                 isn't something that's there by default.  It would be
>                 nice if everyone were using the same thing, could we
>                 clone this repo in our own repo and then just build it
>                 ourselves as part of the build process. The license
>                 looks very permissive, but IANAL.
>                 >>
>                 >> On Tue, Mar 31, 2015 at 9:47 AM Greg Clayton
>                 <gclayton at apple.com <mailto:gclayton at apple.com>> wrote:
>                 >>
>                 >> > On Mar 31, 2015, at 3:35 AM, Aidan Dodds
>                 <aidan at codeplay.com <mailto:aidan at codeplay.com>> wrote:
>                 >> >
>                 >> > On 30/03/2015 18:38, Greg Clayton wrote:
>                 >> > >
>                 >> > > I know about the register numbering stuff and I
>                 would love to see support for the "$qXfer:features:"
>                 added to LLDB. The one thing this data doesn't contain
>                 is the register numbers for the ABI (DWARF register
>                 numbers (for debug info), compiler register numbers
>                 (for like .eh_frame)), but that info could be inferred
>                 from an ABI plugin that we could infer from the
>                 "osabi" of "GNU/Linux" in the target.xml:
>                 >> >
>                 >> > >
>                 >> > > So please do submit patches that implement this
>                 and we will be happy to approve them.
>                 >> >
>                 >> > I am currently prototyping $qXfer:features
>                 support in LLDB with an aim to upstream it. It will
>                 require an XML parser, so I wanted to have a
>                 discussion about adding one to LLDB.
>                 >>
>                 >> Most unix variants have libxml2 that is available.
>                 I am not sure on windows though. I have CC'ed Zachary
>                 to get some input on windows XML (in case LLVM doesn't
>                 already have some support for this).
>                 >>
>                 >> > I have been using TinyXML2 in my prototype, which
>                 is open sourced under the ZLib license. Is there any
>                 policy in LLDB for handling external library dependencies?
>                 >> > Would there be objections to TinyXML2 making its
>                 way into the LLDB code base as an external? Writing a
>                 new XML parser from scratch in LLDB isn't ideal.
>                 >>
>                 >> It would be great to stick with stuff that everyone
>                 has installed and hopefully that is libxml2. Windows
>                 is the biggest question. I am also not sure if llvm or
>                 clang has any XML support, but we should first look to
>                 see if llvm has XML support and if not, then look for
>                 alternatives. We definitely do not want to write our own.
>                 >> >
>                 >> > I would still like to have a discussion about
>                 adding a plugin architecture to gdb-remote making it
>                 easier to handle packets outwith the LLDB based
>                 servers. The code in gdb-remote that sends and handles
>                 packets is scattered over one or two huge classes, it
>                 would be beneficial to start looking at breaking this
>                 up and modularizing it. At least for the packets which
>                 are not supported by lldb's own RSP producers.
>                 >>
>                 >> I say just build all and any support it into
>                 GDBRemoteCommunicationClient and
>                 GDBRemoteCommunicationServer. I don't see the need to
>                 break it up.
>                 >>
>                 >> Greg Clayton
>                 >>
>                 >>
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