[lldb-dev] stop notification expedited registers - critical ones

[Todd Fiala]

Awesome, thanks Jason!


On Fri, Jun 13, 2014 at 11:51 AM, Jason Molenda <jason at molenda.com> wrote:

> The goal is that lldb won't need to ask for any additional register values
> at a typical stop with the command line lldb unless the user issues
> additional commands.  Obviously fp, pc, sp are needed.  Sometimes the
> function arguments (which lldb will print with the frame format) are still
> in registers -- so we include the argument registers.
>
> In performance tuning with iOS, we've consistently found that the size of
> the packets is not particularly important - but the number of packets is
> critical.  I think this will be typical of remote communication with
> devices where there may be several layers involved with the communication.
>  So it's better to include extra registers in the stop packet that lldb
> might need than to have lldb ask for them individually.
>
> You could argue that you should just throw all of the GPRs in the stop
> packet.  Empirically, we've found that the sp/pc/fp/arg regs are enough and
> we've never gone all the way and included all of them.  Maybe with armv7
> where the gpr is relatively small in size we include them all.  The smart
> play is probably just to throw them all in there, even on arm64 where you
> have 32 GPRs.
>
> A good example of the cost of packet-size vrs. number-of-packets was a
> little performance tuning I did recently.  We had a problem where large
> memory reads from an iOS device were slow -- reading, say, 6MB of heap.  I
> made three changes to lldb/debugserver that got us about 12x faster reading
> the same memory from a device:  added a binary "x" read memory packet
> (instead of ascii-hex representations of the memory, so reducing the # of
> bytes sent by half), stopped adding large memory read data to lldb's memory
> cache, and went from 512-byte memory reads to 128kbyte memory reads.  I
> didn't try to tease apart which of these were responsible for the
> performance bump, but I'm willing to bet it was the increase in the size of
> the memory reads and the reduction in the number of packets required.
>
>
>
> On Jun 13, 2014, at 11:18 AM, Todd Fiala <todd.fiala at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Hey Jason,
> >
> > Which are the registers that are most important to contain in the stop
> notification expedited registers section?
> >
> > I'm adding tests for the ones considered essential.  I right now am
> checking for these generic registers: pc, sp, fp.
> >
> > I think you mentioned it would be nice to have some of the arg registers
> as well?  Anything else?
> >
> > The tests go upstream in llvm.org svn for debugserver, and the llgs
> tests are enabled in the llgs branch and then I use that to drive the llgs
> implementation.
> >
> > Thanks!
> > --
> > -Todd
>
>
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-- 
Todd Fiala | Software Engineer | tfiala at google.com | 650-943-3180
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