[lldb-dev] LLDB porting docs

[Greg Clayton]

There currently aren't any documents. I need to sit down and write them sometime soon.

A few questions:

The big one: Does LLVM support the VLIW architecture? If not we won't have a way to evaluate expressions, or disassemble. This would be a show stopper if there is no LLVM support.

What file format will the executables for VLIW be using? Hopefully ELF32 of ELF64? If so, then there is no work to be done on the ObjectFile parser side.

Is this for bareboard or OS development?
  If bareboard, no work needs to be done on the DynamicLoader plug-in side.
  If OS developtment where you will have shared libraries loading/unloading then you will need to write a DynamicLoader plug-in for your OS or kernel.

The plug-ins you will then need to subclass and create would be:
- lldb_private::Platform
- lldb_private::ABI
- lldb_private::Process

The Platform plug-in helps answer questions like "where is the file /usr/lib/libfoo.so locally on this machine" when you are doing a debug session. It also helps with locating executables in bundles, and selecting the right architecture from executables if you have an executable bundle or binary that contains one or more architecture versions.

The ABI plug-in helps us to be able to find out where arguments are passed when making function calls and when looking for return values from function calls. It also helps define a whole bunch of other things that are defined by the ABI like which registers are spilled/volatile/etc.

The Process plug-in is the part that connects to your remote system. If you are using a JTAG library that can speak the GDB remote protocol, you might not have to write a Process plug-in. how do you communicate and debug your executables? Do you have a running OS where lldb is running in user space on that OS? Will you be doing remote debugging? If so, how does one communicate with your remote debug session?

Greg Clayton


On Jan 4, 2012, at 10:31 PM, Mool Chand Tyagi wrote:

> Hi, 
> 
> I am looking forward to use LLDB to port to a VLIW architecture, can anyone help me by providing some pointers to documents or Readme texts.. ?
> 
> thanks and regards,
> tyagi
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
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