[Lldb-commits] [PATCH] Initial Assembly profiler for mips64

[Jason Molenda]

I think you're making the same mistake I made initially when Greg proposed "instruction emulation".  This can mean two things:

1. Full emulation of the entire instruction set by the Instruction plugin, with flags to indicate instructions that are relevant to prologue/epilogue analysis.
2. Emulation a half dozen instructions used in prologues/epilogues, ignoring all the others and assuming they don't do anything related to unwinding.

In both cases, the EmulateInstruction plugin marks up attributes about the instructions ("This instruction just saved a register on the stack", "this instruction just changed the stack pointer").  Another architecture-independent class, UnwindAssemblyInstEmulation, uses these attributes and generates an UnwindPlan.

Greg's suggestion to write the MIPS assembly profiler is suggesting approach #2 above.  He isn't looking for full ISA emulation like we happen to do for ARM.  The ARM64 assembly profiler is a better example of what he wants here.

The UnwindAssembly-x86 class mixes the architecture specific instruction matching and the UnwindPlan generation together.  He wants to see a separation of the architecture specific bits and the architecture independent bits, that's all.

The only hiccup to this, my only reluctance to push for this wholeheartedly, is that UnwindAssemblyInstEmulation *should* be architecture independent but to-date it has only been used for arm & arm64.  It may have assumptions about the way those architectures set up/tear down stack frames.

It would be interesting to rewrite UnwindAssembly-x86 in the instruction emulation style to shake out any arm assumptions in UnwindAssemblyInstEmulation -- and when I say write it in instruction-emulation style, I don't mean adding any additional instructions, just the dozen insns it knows about today.  But it'll be a little while before I have free time to do that myself.


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http://reviews.llvm.org/D7696

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