[lldb-dev] showing CPU register flags

[Jim Ingham via lldb-dev]

We've talked about providing a more natural view of registers that are logically made of subfields, as you describe, but I don't think any work has been done on that front.

The ValueObjectRegister has a couple of ways to implement this display.  The ValueObjectRegisters can be given a type, and then will display the subfields as though they were of that type.  So you could cons up synthetic types for your registers, and use that to display them.  The other way would be to use the synthetic child mechanism for ValueObjects in general, would be pretty amenable to this sort of re-presentation.  Another slightly tricky bit would be that if you showed a register as having "sub-fields" folks would probably assume they could use these for "register write" as well are "register read".  I don't think the synthetic children can be used to change values of the ValueObject that produced them.  But if you gave them a synthetic type instead, that might just fall out.

The other concern is that the "register read" command uses a lower level interface (RegisterValues) rather than using ValueObjectRegister's.  The RegisterValues really want to be scalars, so they don't provide a natural way to do this.  You would probably have to convert "register read" over to use the ValueObject for this project to be worth doing.

Jim


> On Aug 17, 2016, at 8:17 AM, Giusti, Valentina via lldb-dev <lldb-dev at lists.llvm.org> wrote:
> 
> Hi everyone,
> 
> I am currently implementing the support for the Intel MPX registers in LLDB. This register set includes 2 registers, BNDSTATUS and BNDCFGU, which store information about the status and configuration of the MPX feature in several fields.
> I think that it would be useful for the user to have a nice display of such fields, so that they don't have to extract the information from the raw values of the registers. However, I see that the other registers are just displayed as raw values, without any better ways to explore their contents.
> 
> Should I just follow this approach, and also just let the MPX registers be available through their raw values? 
> Or have there ever been any requests for ways to display the register flags from LLDB?
> 
> Thanks,
> - Valentina Giusti
> 
> 
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