[PATCH] Have clang list the imported modules in the debug info
Adrian Prantl
aprantl at apple.com
Mon Mar 16 17:14:05 PDT 2015
Thanks for the explanation David, I missed that it is entirely the linker's (or some dwarf post-processor's) responsibility to find the module files and link in the debug info from the .pcm files, so debugger doesn’t notice a difference.
> On Mar 16, 2015, at 2:55 PM, David Blaikie <dblaikie at gmail.com> wrote:
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> On Mon, Mar 16, 2015 at 2:45 PM, Robinson, Paul <Paul_Robinson at playstation.sony.com <mailto:Paul_Robinson at playstation.sony.com>> wrote:
> Beyond the above (that using a new tag would mean this would go from 'free' to 'not free' for GDB) having a new top level tag is pretty substantial (we only have two at the moment, and with our talk of modules being a "bag of dwarf" might go back to having one top level tag? (it's not clear to me from DWARF4 whether DW_TAG_module is currently a top-level tag, I don't think it is?)
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> The .debug_info section contains one or more compilation units, partial units, or in DWARF 5, type units. DW_TAG_module isn't a unit, if you want it to be handled independently then it would need to be wrapped in a DW_TAG_partial_unit. You would probably then use DW_TAG_imported_unit to refer to it, rather than DW_TAG_imported_module. <>
>
> This makes a fair bit of sense - though the terminology's never going to quite line up with modules, I suspect, and this would still require modifying existing consumers (well, GDB) that can handle split-dwarf today, I suspect (not sure how it'd handle partial_unit - maybe that does work? - and still don't know how existing consumers would handle imported_unit either - could be worth some testing, as it sounds sort of right out of several less right options).
The standard specifically recommends DW_TAG_partial_unit for #include directives so that sounds like a comparatively good match. Partial units were already introduced in DWARF3 so maybe GDB supports them. But even if it doesn’t this shouldn’t necessarily be a problem (unless it crashes). The DW_TAG_imported_unit since this is primarily useful for AST-based debuggers that know how to import a module before expression evaluation.
-- adrian
> - David
> (Sorry about the top-quoting but Outlook can't handle HTML editing properly.)
>
Unfortunately the gmail client somewhat forces a thread to HTML — gmail quotation markers mysteriously disappear in the plain text version displayed by other mail clients.
> --paulr
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> From: David Blaikie [mailto:dblaikie at gmail.com <mailto:dblaikie at gmail.com>]
> Sent: Monday, March 16, 2015 1:36 PM
> To: Adrian Prantl
> Cc: Richard Smith; Eric Christopher; llvm cfe; Greg Clayton; Robinson, Paul
> Subject: Re: [PATCH] Have clang list the imported modules in the debug info
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> On Mon, Mar 16, 2015 at 1:24 PM, Adrian Prantl <aprantl at apple.com <mailto:aprantl at apple.com>> wrote:
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> On Mar 10, 2015, at 12:10 PM, David Blaikie <dblaikie at gmail.com <mailto:dblaikie at gmail.com>> wrote:
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> On Tue, Mar 10, 2015 at 12:05 PM, Adrian Prantl <aprantl at apple.com <mailto:aprantl at apple.com>> wrote:
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> On Mar 9, 2015, at 5:16 PM, David Blaikie <dblaikie at gmail.com <mailto:dblaikie at gmail.com>> wrote:
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> On Mon, Mar 9, 2015 at 5:07 PM, Adrian Prantl <aprantl at apple.com <mailto:aprantl at apple.com>> wrote:
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> On Mar 9, 2015, at 2:14 PM, David Blaikie <dblaikie at gmail.com <mailto:dblaikie at gmail.com>> wrote:
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> On Mon, Mar 9, 2015 at 1:52 PM, Adrian Prantl <aprantl at apple.com <mailto:aprantl at apple.com>> wrote:
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> On Feb 24, 2015, at 3:06 PM, David Blaikie <dblaikie at gmail.com <mailto:dblaikie at gmail.com>> wrote:
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> On Tue, Feb 24, 2015 at 2:56 PM, Adrian Prantl <aprantl at apple.com <mailto:aprantl at apple.com>> wrote:
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> On Feb 24, 2015, at 2:36 PM, David Blaikie <dblaikie at gmail.com <mailto:dblaikie at gmail.com>> wrote:
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> On Mon, Feb 23, 2015 at 3:45 PM, Adrian Prantl <aprantl at apple.com <mailto:aprantl at apple.com>> wrote:
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> On Feb 23, 2015, at 3:37 PM, David Blaikie <dblaikie at gmail.com <mailto:dblaikie at gmail.com>> wrote:
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> On Mon, Feb 23, 2015 at 3:32 PM, Adrian Prantl <aprantl at apple.com <mailto:aprantl at apple.com>> wrote:
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> On Feb 23, 2015, at 3:14 PM, David Blaikie <dblaikie at gmail.com <mailto:dblaikie at gmail.com>> wrote:
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> On Mon, Feb 23, 2015 at 3:08 PM, Adrian Prantl <aprantl at apple.com <mailto:aprantl at apple.com>> wrote:
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> On Feb 23, 2015, at 2:59 PM, David Blaikie <dblaikie at gmail.com <mailto:dblaikie at gmail.com>> wrote:
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> On Mon, Feb 23, 2015 at 2:51 PM, Adrian Prantl <aprantl at apple.com <mailto:aprantl at apple.com>> wrote:
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> > On Jan 20, 2015, at 11:07 AM, David Blaikie <dblaikie at gmail.com <mailto:dblaikie at gmail.com>> wrote:
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> > My vague recollection from the previous design discussions was that these module references would be their own 'unit' COMDAT'd so that we don't end up with the duplication of every module reference in every unit linked together when linking debug info?
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> > I think in my brain I'd been picturing this module reference as being an extended fission reference (fission skeleton CU + extra fields for users who want to load the Clang AST module directly and skip the split CU).
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> Apologies for letting this rest for so long.
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> Your memory was of course correct and I didn’t follow up on this because I had convinced myself that the fission reference would be completely sufficient. Now that I’ve been thinking some more about it, I don’t think that it is sufficient in the LTO case.
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> Here is the example from thehttp://lists.cs.uiuc.edu/pipermail/cfe-dev/2014-November/040076.html <http://lists.cs.uiuc.edu/pipermail/cfe-dev/2014-November/040076.html>:
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> foo.o:
> .debug_info.dwo
> DW_TAG_compile_unit
> // For DWARF consumers
> DW_AT_dwo_name ("/path/to/module-cache/MyModule.pcm")
> DW_AT_dwo_id ([unique AST signature])
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> .debug_info
> DW_TAG_compile_unit
> DW_TAG_variable
> DW_AT_name "x"
> DW_AT_type (DW_FORM_ref_sig8) ([hash for MyStruct])
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> In this example it is clear that foo.o imported MyModule because its DWO skeleton is there in the same object file. But if we deal with the result of an LTO compilation we will end up with many compile units in the same .debug_info section, plus a bunch of skeleton compile units for _all_ imported modules in the entire project. We thus loose the ability to determine which of the compile units imported which module.
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> Why would we need to know which CU imported which modules? (I can imagine some possible reasons, but wondering what you have in mind)
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> When the debugger is stopped at a breakpoint and the user wants to evaluate an expression, it should import the modules that are available at this location, so the user can write the expression from within the context of the breakpoint (e.g., without having to fully qualify each type, etc).
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> I'm not sure how much current debuggers actually worry about that - (& this may differ from lldb to gdb to other things, of course). I'm pretty sure at least for GDB, a context in one CU is as good as one in another (at least without split-dwarf, type units, etc - with those sometimes things end up overly restrictive as the debugger won't search everything properly).
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> eg: if you have a.cpp: int main() { }, b.cpp: void func() { } and you run 'start' in gdb (which breaks at the beginning of main) you can still run 'p func()' to call the func, even though there's no declaration of it in a.cpp, etc.
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> LLDB would definitely care (as it is using clang for the expression evaluation supporting these kinds of features is really straightforward there). By importing the modules (rather than searching through the DWARF), the expression evaluator gains access to additional declarations that are not there in the DWARF, such as templates. But since clang modules are not namespaces, we can’t generally "import the world” as a debugger would usually do.
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> Sorry, not sure I understand this last sentence - could you explain further?
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> I imagine it would be rather limiting for the user if they could only use expressions that are valid in this file from the file - it wouldn't be uncommon to want to call a function from another module/file/etc to aid in debugging.
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> Usually LLDB’s expression evaluator works by creating a clang AST type out of a DWARF type and inserting it into its AST context. We could pre-polulate it with the definitions from the imported modules (with all sorts of benefits as described above), but that only works if no two modules conflict. If the declaration can’t be found in any imported module, LLDB would still import it from DWARF in the “traditional” fashion.
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> But it would import it from DWARF in other TUs rather than use the module info just because the module wasn't directly referenced from this TU? That would seem strange to me. (you would lose debug info fidelity (by falling back to DWARF even though there are modules with the full fidelity info) unnecessarily, it sounds like)
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> I think it’s reasonable to expect full fidelity for everything that is available in the current TU, and having the normal DWARF-based debugging capabilities for everything beyond that. But we can only ever provide full fidelity if we have the list of imports for the current TU.
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> Would it be reasonable to use the accelerator table/index to lookup the types, then if the type is in the module you could use the module rather than the DWARF stashed alongside it? (so the comdat'd split-dwarf skeleton CU for the module would have an index to tell you what names are inside it, but if you got an index hit you'd just look at the module instead of loading the split-dwarf debug info in the referenced file)
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> I don’t think this approach would work for templates and enumerator values;
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> Not sure why enumerator values are an issue - but templates (& all manner of other things that don't make it into the index, unfortunately), sure.
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> they aren’t in the accelerator tables to begin with. It would also be slower if the declaration is available in a module.
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> Though you're rapidly going to end up loading a lot of modules in (as you go up & down a stack printing various things you'll cross into other TUs & load more modules).
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> For a standard DWARF consumer, it seems fine to just have a comdat'd skeleton CU for a module without the need for other CUs to mention which module CUs they reference (but I could be wrong here) & that's the design we originally discussed.
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> It would seem unfortunate to bloat every CU with a non-deduplicable list of every module it references, but if that's necessary for a serialized AST aware debugger, it might be fine to have it as an option (so long as it can be turned off) & may still benefit from that list not being the authoritative module reference, but a /very/ terse reference to it so all the extra flags & stuff can be in the deduplicable comdat (& to keep it as consistent as possible between the flag (on/off) codepaths for this extra data). Maybe a FORM_block (?) of fixed-size hashes of all the modules back-to-back, so it's as small as possible?
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> But I wouldn't mind spending some more time discussing whether there's a better way to keep these things streamlined/symmetric/the same between modular and non-modular debug info.
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> Sure!
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> Now that we established that recording the list of imported modules for every CU is useful for an AST-based debugger,
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> +Richard, just to see if he's got some ideas about how a debugger might efficiently use modules to support debugger scenarios and whether or not having a list of which modules are referenced from which contexts is valuable in that.
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> It still concerns me that this would create something of a regression/oddity/difference between AST-based debug info (you wouldn't be able to handle expressions referencing things in other TUs) and non-AST based debug info (where I think the average user is used to not worrying about what headers are included in the current file they're debugging when they try to use a type or other identifier)
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> If I understood you correctly, this is not actually the case. The list of imported modules allows the AST-based debugger to import all the modules that were imported by the CU that the current frame is in. This enables the user to, e.g., type "p myVector->size()" even though std::vector<MyClass>::size() was not used by the CU and is thus not available in DWARF.
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> If the user types “p foo” even though foo was not defined in any imported module the debugger can — after failing to import foo via clang — still fall back to looking up foo in DWARF and do what it always did.
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> If you do the DWARF fallback then you'll get a pretty clear inconsistency between templates and non-templates. If I have a function foo and a function template foo_tmpl in one file, and I'm debugging in another file I'll be able to call 'foo' (normal DWARF fallback/search) but not foo_tmpl (if I'm calling a new instantiation of foo_tmpl - if I'm calling an existing instantiation presumably the fallback would catch me). Seems unfortunate/confusing, perhaps.
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> Good point, but it my guess is that this wouldn’t be any worse than the “why can’t I print the size() of this vector!?”-situations we have at the moment.
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> Sure - it's strictly better in the sense that there are strictly more expressions that can be evaluated, but seems incomplete is my point, and maybe worth considering alternative designs that might be more-betterer.
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> In certain situations (i.e., non-templates) the debugger could use the DWARF in the modules to print a message about which module to import.
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> let’s talk about how to most efficiently represent this information.
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> In the CU, using DW_TAG_imported_module appears to be the most appropriate choice, even though there is some room for confusion since C++ using declarations are also represented this way. Inside the DW_TAG_imported_module, we could use
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> (1) a DW_AT_import that references the skeleton (I hope that is the right terminology) CU for the module, the idea being that the skeleton CU would contain all the details (flags, name, include dirs, hash, ...) and be in a comdat'ed section.
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> I'd be concerned about overloading the terminology & confusing other debuggers - they might try to follow the DW_AT_import and be surprised that it doesn't refer to a DW_TAG_namespace tag.
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> That’s a valid concern, and we probably should not be emitting this if we have any evidence of, e.g., gdb crashes when encountering such a construct. Then again, we would be using a DW_TAG_imported_module to express what it is meant to express according to the DWARF spec (namely importing a module)... but I admit that the tag also does have a very specific meaning for C++, which we maybe shouldn’t overload.
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> That's my concern, yes.
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> The right thing here is probably to put aside my personal sense of aesthetics and use a private _LLVM_ namespace for all new additions, and then attempt to standardize an official DWARF version once we know what is really needed and what isn't.
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> I'd prefer this, yes. I mean the usual bar we use for language features is that they're at least proposed for standardization before we adopt them in clang - I wouldn't mind a similar bar here. If you want to bring up this use of DW_TAG_imported_module with the DWARF committee & see if it sounds reasonable (& test/inquire about GDB's behavior here).
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> I started a thread on dwarf-discuss to this end (http://lists.dwarfstd.org/listinfo.cgi/dwarf-discuss-dwarfstd.org <http://lists.dwarfstd.org/listinfo.cgi/dwarf-discuss-dwarfstd.org>, the list archives are only visible to subscribers, but anyone can subscribe).
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> Cool cool
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> To paraphrase the replies that my question solicited: We are, perhaps not very surprising, encouraged to follow the standard and use a DW_TAG_imported_module that references a DW_TAG_module. If we, however, choose to describe the module by using a skeleton DW_TAG_compile_unit, we should be careful (my own words) about using a DW_TAG_imported_module until that use is sanctioned by the standard.
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> I see two possible ways to proceed in this spirit:
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> a) Rename the module skeleton DW_TAG_compile_units to DW_TAG_module, but keep all the comdat/split dwarf goodness from the original proposal [1]. My understanding is that even though we are making clever use of the split DWARF features, GDB would still need to be taught to follow references to external files,
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> Not sure what you're referring to here, perhaps a misunderstanding about how split DWARF works.
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> To the best of my knowledge, what we've talked about for module DWARF debug info is actually just split-dwarf, no extra work required by DWARF consumers*.
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> * It's, admittedly, a little tricksy to include type unit references in an object file that doesn't include the type unit at all - relying on it being linked into the final executable. But DWARF doesn't really talk about objects versus executables, etc - so, so long as the type unit is there in the end, it's valid DWARF no matter how it got there (& should work fine for existing consumers - they can't tell if the type unit was in every object file that referenced the type or not once it's been linked and deduplicated).
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> so having it recognize a new tag in this context doesn’t appear to be much additional effort (but others may provide more insight here).
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> Beyond the above (that using a new tag would mean this would go from 'free' to 'not free' for GDB) having a new top level tag is pretty substantial (we only have two at the moment, and with our talk of modules being a "bag of dwarf" might go back to having one top level tag? (it's not clear to me from DWARF4 whether DW_TAG_module is currently a top-level tag, I don't think it is?)
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> b) Emit an LLVM-specific DW_AT_LLVM_import attribute inside the DW_TAG_imported_module (or vice versa) that refers to the skeleton DW_TAG_compile_unit.
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> I think that option (a) is a bit more elegant and it is bending the dwarf standard not quite as much and will make the dwarf output a bit more readable.
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> -- adrian
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> [1] Module debugging proposal for reference: http://lists.cs.uiuc.edu/pipermail/cfe-dev/2014-November/040076.html <http://lists.cs.uiuc.edu/pipermail/cfe-dev/2014-November/040076.html>
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> - David
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> -- adrian
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> But extension tags seems like the conservatively correct option (not sure what GDB does on tags it doesn't recognize - I forget if it warns or just completely ignores them, hopefully the latter)
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> (2) David’s suggestion of using a custom form that records the module hash directly is quite space-efficient, but it has the drawback of not being resilient against small changes to the imported module
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> That's going to be true of the normal fission info here (the skeleton CU and the full CU in the .dwo file (or module) are associated by hash) - granted, in the "loading an AST" mode, you can ignore those hashes and rely on your custom attributes instead.
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> , since clang’s module hash changes each time the module is being rebuilt.
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> Clang's module hash only changes if the DWARF contents change - it doesn't use a timestamp or anything. It seems like actually you're going to want to fail to load even more aggressively - there are ways the AST might've changed that the debug info doesn't reflect but are still important (a type unreferenced in this module, but built into some other code that is not built with debug info changes - no hash changes because the debug info for that type is unreferenced here, but if you try to use it you could have an incompatible layout, etc).
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> Agreed: If the module contents changed the debugger needs to display a big flashing "here be dragons" warning.
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> This is less of an issue if the hash is referring to a skeleton CU in the same file, which contains all the detailed information.
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> Personally I’d prefer option 1 because mostly uses the existing mechanisms from DWARF. Here’s a visual guide to the options on the table:
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> (1)
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> foo.o (compiled with, let’s call it .. "-gmodule-imports”)
>
> -----
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> .debug_info:
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> DW_TAG_compile_unit
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> DW_AT_name(“foo.c”)
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> DW_TAG_imported_module
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> DW_AT_import(DW_FORM_ref_addr 0x123) // Could be a FORM_ref_sig8 0x1234ABCDE as well.
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> DW_TAG_imported_module
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> DW_AT_import(...)
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> .debug_info.dwo:
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> // Skeleton CUs for modules imported by foo.o.
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> 0x123:
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> DW_TAG_compile_unit
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> // Used by split-dwarf debuggers to find external type definitions.
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> DW_AT_dwo_name(“/tmp/org.llvm.clang/ModuleCache/1234ABCDE/Foundation.pcm”)
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> DW_AT_dwo_id(“0x1234ABCDE”)
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> // Used by AST-based debuggers to import the module.
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> DW_AT_name(“Foundation”)
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> (side notes: the mixed indentation here makes it a bit hard to read this example, and I'd make sure /all/ the extended attributes (including the name here) use custom attribute names, not standard ones)
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> Agreed.
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> DW_AT_LLVM_sysroot(“/“)
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> DW_AT_LLVM_include_dir(“”)
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> DW_AT_LLVM_macros(“-DNDEBUG”)
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> (2)
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> .debug_info.dwo:
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> (As above.)
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> .debug_info:
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> DW_TAG_compile_unit
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> DW_AT_name(“foo.c”)
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> DW_AT_LLVM_imported_modules(DW_FORM_block 0x1234ABCDE 0xDEADBEEF 0x....)
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> Now I’m curious what option (3) will look like; the one that we’ll actually implement!
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> ;)
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> -- adrian
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