[lldb-dev] lldb does not permit memory reads when target is running

[Greg Clayton]

Documentation bug indeed. 

Brief history: we started with the ability to read/write memory while running a long time ago. We switched away from this after our IDE was trying to make too many memory requests while the process was running to avoid interruption issues. These issues would happen when quickly stepping a target and where a variable view was trying to display the variables asynchronously after each process stopped notification and it would still be trying to display variables from stop #10 after we had resumed for the single step. Also since we manually run expression by interpreting the IR, we can run into issues where an expression is modifying memory (usually due to data formatters or synthetic child providers again for the variable view) as the process is running, so we needed to outlaw memory reads/writes while the process is running to avoid race conditions with expressions and having these expressions possibly modify variables and memory after we have resumed.



> On Jun 5, 2014, at 10:48 PM, Matthew Gardiner <mg11 at csr.com> wrote:
> 
> Hi folks,
> 
> http://lldb.llvm.org/tutorial.html states:
> 
> "
> The commands that currently work while running include interrupting the process to halt execution ("process interrupt"), getting the process status ("process status"), breakpoint setting and clearing (" breakpoint [set|clear|enable|disable|list] ..."), and memory reading and writing (" memory [read|write] ...").
> "
> 
> However, I tried to read memory when my (embedded harvard arch) target is running:
> 
> (lldb) target list
> Current targets:
> * target #0: /home/mg11/src/main/devtools/main/heracles/csrgdbserver/test/examples/simple/kalgsd5te.elf ( arch=unknown--linux, platform=host, pid=1, state=running )
> (lldb) memory read 0x1000 --count 4
> error: Process is running.  Use 'process interrupt' to pause execution.
> (lldb)
> 
> 
> Does my observation reflect a documentation or coding bug?
> 
> thanks
> Matthew Gardiner
> 
> 
> 
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