[cfe-dev] How do SJLJ-Exceptions works?

[Gaier, Bjoern via cfe-dev]

Hello Tim,

Thank you! Both source files gave me a good idea about what is happening! That is really interesting!

Kind greetings
Björn

-----Original Message-----
From: Tim Northover <t.p.northover at gmail.com>
Sent: 10 February 2020 19:27
To: Gaier, Bjoern <Bjoern.Gaier at horiba.com>
Cc: Clang Dev <cfe-dev at lists.llvm.org>; llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org
Subject: Re: [cfe-dev] How do SJLJ-Exceptions works?

Hi Bjoern,

On Mon, 10 Feb 2020 at 07:30, Gaier, Bjoern via cfe-dev <cfe-dev at lists.llvm.org> wrote:
> When I execute a function with a try-catch segment, as soon as I hit the try statement (Pretending I'm a Debugger or so), I would save the registerts (RSP, RIP of the catch block) on the stack I guess and keep doing what I do. However, when I encounter an exception now - how do I know where to find my stored registers on the stack?

It's a bit more dependent on the runtime than that. You can use -fsjlj-exceptions with Clang to see what it would actually do to code even on platforms that normally use DWARF based exceptions (obviously just a tool to inspect assembly, you shouldn't try to run the result).

Roughly speaking, try blocks result in a call to some function like _Unwind_SjLj_Register that stashes the information needed to find the right catch block and/or call needed destructors in a reasonably generic fashion. It looks like libunwind's implementation makes those frame-contexts into a linked-list accessed (essentially) via a global variable.

The key files are lib/CodeGen/SjLjEHPrepare.cpp in LLVM and src/Unwind-sjlj.c in libunwind.

> Also is that the mysterious 'stack unwinding' I often heard about?

More or less. The process libunwind goes through to look through all these registered frames and restore needed state is called unwinding.

Cheers.

Tim.
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