[lldb-dev] Problem unwinding from inside of a CRT function

[Ted Woodward]

Let me echo what Vince is saying; I’m about to dig into the unwinder and currently have no idea how it works. The conversation in this thread has helped a ton.

 

We’re currently using the default unwinder, but I need to add some special case stuff. Any thoughts on where to look to see a custom implementation?

 

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From: lldb-dev-bounces at cs.uiuc.edu [mailto:lldb-dev-bounces at cs.uiuc.edu] On Behalf Of Vince Harron
Sent: Friday, January 16, 2015 4:13 PM
To: Greg Clayton
Cc: lldb-dev at cs.uiuc.edu
Subject: Re: [lldb-dev] Problem unwinding from inside of a CRT function

 

> be sure think about the problem in a wider scope than "the code I am thinking about is linear" and think about all sorts of single stepping and what you would expect to happen.

 

Thanks very much for helping us understand this stuff.  I was also super curious how this single step stuff works and what the non-obvious (to us) cases are.

 

When we're up to speed we should be able to really contribute some good stuff.

 

Vince

 

 

 

On Fri, Jan 16, 2015 at 1:53 PM, Greg Clayton <gclayton at apple.com <mailto:gclayton at apple.com> > wrote:

>
> On Jan 16, 2015, at 1:12 PM, Zachary Turner <zturner at google.com <mailto:zturner at google.com> > wrote:
>
>
>
> On Fri Jan 16 2015 at 12:45:00 PM <jingham at apple.com <mailto:jingham at apple.com> > wrote:
>
> > On Jan 16, 2015, at 12:14 PM, Zachary Turner <zturner at google.com <mailto:zturner at google.com> > wrote:
> >
> > I'm still trying to wrap my head around the way LLDB does things.
> >
> > If I understand correctly, when you run thread step-over, it enters single step mode (by setting the trap flag on the CPU).  Every time the CPU traps, LLDB picks this up and asks the ThreadPlan "should i stop now?"  "should i stop now?" until the ThreadPlan returns true.  And part of this "should i stop now" involves generating an unwind.
> >
>
> That's close, but not quite correct.
>
> 1) In the original implementation, (and this is how gdb does it, BTW) lldb single-stepped till "something interesting happened."  As an optimization, when you are doing any kind of step through source range, I changed lldb so it runs from "instruction that could branch" to "instruction that could branch" using breakpoints.  Then when it hits an instruction that could branch it single steps that instruction, and then figures out from where that went what to do next.
>
> BTW, if it were helpful to figure out what to do next, we could store some info (the old stack frame or whatever) when we hit a branch instruction, and then use it when the single-step completed.  I haven't needed to do that yet, however; Jason's always been able to get the unwinder work reliably enough not to require this.
> Let's say you're stopped at the first line of foo() here.
>
> 1.     void foo()
> 2.     {
> 3. ->     printf(
> 4.              "Line 1\n");
> 5.         printf("Line 2\n");
> 6.         printf("Line 3\n");
> 7.     }
>
> When you step-over, why can't it just say: Ok, current source line is 3. Debug info tells me that the next instruction begins on line 5.  Line 5 corresponds to address 0x12345678.  Put a breakpoint on 0x12345678.  To account for the fact that foo() may be recursive, also save off a copy of the stack pointer.  When the breakpoint is hit, stop if the stack pointer is the same or less than the saved value (depending on the definition of "less" for your architecture), otherwise don't stop.

How about:

2     for (int i=0; i<100; i++)
3 ->    printf ("i = %i\n", i); //
4     printf ("this won't be executed after line 3 except for the last time\n");

If you set a breakpoint on line 4 after line 3 when you will fail to return to line 3 when single stepping.

How about:

2 ->  goto carp;
3     puts("won't ever be executed");
4    carp:
5     puts("will get executed");

If you set a breakpoint at line 3 you won't stop.

Another:

2 -> throw foo();
3    puts("this will never get hit");

If you set a breakpoint at line 3 you will never hit it.

Please trust that we know what we are doing when it comes to single stepping. I am glad you are thinking about how things are done, but just be sure think about the problem in a wider scope than "the code I am thinking about is linear" and think about all sorts of single stepping and what you would expect to happen.


Also, did you get my comment about improving functions bounds in the COFF parser? If you can do this, you won't really need to do any of the unwinding stuff because the assembly unwinder will take care of it, you just need to get good function bounds for everything using any means necessary in the ObjectFileCOFF parser by making all the symbols you can. You also need to identify what parts are trampolines. For example a call to printf usually goes through a PLT entry. These are often in one place in your binary and often there are not symbols in the symbol table for these. Identifying the symbols with a name like "printf" and also making the symbol a eSymbolTypeTrampoline will allow us to not set a breakpoint on your "printf" trampoline when you say "b printf" on the command line, and it will also give function bounds to these small trampoline code sections so we can step and unwind through them.

Greg





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Vince Harron |

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 vharron at google.com <mailto:vharron at google.com>  |

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