[llvm-dev] [cfe-dev] RFC: CodeView debug info emission in Clang/LLVM

Thu Nov 5 05:38:21 PST 2015

I do not think that “FileChecksums” mentioned in CodeView patch (http://reviews.llvm.org/D14209) is the same thing as in DWARF 5.
In DWARF 5 the checksum is for the generated debug info sections, like debug_info, .debug_macro, etc. Thus, it make sense to do it in the codegen (debug emitter)
In CodeView, I believe the checksum is for the source file, which make more sense to calculate it in Clang.

Dave, might be able to explain it for us.

Regards,
Amjad

From: Robinson, Paul [mailto:Paul_Robinson at playstation.sony.com]
Sent: Monday, November 02, 2015 23:01
To: Aboud, Amjad; David Blaikie; Zachary Turner; Dave Bartolomeo
Cc: cfe-dev at lists.llvm.org; llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org
Subject: RE: [llvm-dev] [cfe-dev] RFC: CodeView debug info emission in Clang/LLVM

| 1.      In Frontend: File Checksum, it is probably a calculation that Clang should do and send to the backend through DIFile.
If this is what I think it is, there's a DWARF 5 feature to make use of it as well.  Searching on "file" and "checksum" in the microsoft-pdb link doesn't turn up any hits, though.

| 2.      In Backend: Extend “X86 Dwarf<->LLVM register mappings” to support “X86 CodeView<->LLVM register mappings”
I suppose this would only be particularly useful for X86, but it would be target-dependent.
--paulr

From: llvm-dev [mailto:llvm-dev-bounces at lists.llvm.org] On Behalf Of Aboud, Amjad via llvm-dev
Sent: Sunday, November 01, 2015 4:10 AM
To: David Blaikie; Zachary Turner; Dave Bartolomeo
Cc: llvm-dev; cfe-dev at lists.llvm.org<mailto:cfe-dev at lists.llvm.org>
Subject: Re: [llvm-dev] [cfe-dev] RFC: CodeView debug info emission in Clang/LLVM

I also think that we should keep one representation of debug info in the LLVM IR.
There would be a need to extend some of the debug info entries to support CodeView, but I think that most of the information generated today by Clang for Dwarf can be used for generating CodeView.

I can think about two missing extensions that are needed to CodeView:

1.      In Frontend: File Checksum, it is probably a calculation that Clang should do and send to the backend through DIFile.

2.      In Backend: Extend “X86 Dwarf<->LLVM register mappings” to support “X86 CodeView<->LLVM register mappings”

I can think about more differences (gaps) between Dwarf and CodeView that need to be closed, however, it is doable with one uniform (generic) debug info metadata in the LLVM IR.

Regards,
Amjad

From: llvm-dev [mailto:llvm-dev-bounces at lists.llvm.org] On Behalf Of David Blaikie via llvm-dev
Sent: Sunday, November 01, 2015 00:20
To: Zachary Turner
Cc: llvm-dev; cfe-dev at lists.llvm.org<mailto:cfe-dev at lists.llvm.org>
Subject: Re: [llvm-dev] [cfe-dev] RFC: CodeView debug info emission in Clang/LLVM

On Sat, Oct 31, 2015 at 3:07 PM, Zachary Turner via llvm-dev <llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org<mailto:llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org>> wrote:
Definitely having someone who knows both formats well would be an advantage.  Dave B might be in the best position to do this, so hopefully he can provide a couple more examples of areas where he has trouble expressing CV information entirely in the backend.

Regardless of what everyone ends up deciding on with regards to the front-end / back-discussion, I want to suggest separating the work into separate pieces that can go in independently of each other.

For example, the proposed LLVMCodeView library, which simply reads and writes raw CV records, seems to be orthogonal to this discussion and could be submitted independently.

I haven't looked at the patch in general, but that sounds quite plausible - unit tests or what-have-you that demonstrate the expected behavior regardless of wehre it ultimately ends up being used from (LLVM, Clang, or both)

On Sat, Oct 31, 2015 at 12:04 PM Robinson, Paul via llvm-dev <llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org<mailto:llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org>> wrote:
The details of the mangling would be ABI dependent not debug-info-format dependent.  Metadata already allows conveying a mangled name into LLVM, as David Blaikie mentioned, so that's not really an issue. The frontend knows how to construct the mangled name, the backend knows where the mangled name goes in the final debug info.  It's a pretty reasonable separation of concerns.

I didn't see anything in this quickie overview of CodeView that wouldn't be expressible in DWARF, so there's nothing (yet) persuasive to suggest metadata should be format-aware.  It would be worthwhile for somebody knowledgeable in one format to take a good detailed look at the other, just to make sure; please provide a link to the detailed CodeView description when it becomes available.

Regarding source-language awareness of the debug-info generator, that's really not a concern (and I say this as someone who once helped add DWARF emission of COBOL-specific entries to a compiler backend that was not entirely clear how to spell COBOL).  You need an API that is able to specify the constructs used by the language, and the rest of it is just processing those record types the way they're supposed to be.  The backend is not doing any language-semantic analysis of the info, it's just doing what it's told.

Abstractly, the exercise of generalizing LLVM metadata to be able to support more than one debug-info format feels like a good thing. Metadata used to be more closely tied to DWARF (e.g., used DWARF tag codes directly in the metadata nodes to identify things) but it has been evolving away from that to a class hierarchy that is not so explicitly DWARF-ish.  Handling CodeView would encourage that direction, rather than being a more fundamental shift.
--paulr

From: cfe-dev [mailto:cfe-dev-bounces at lists.llvm.org<mailto:cfe-dev-bounces at lists.llvm.org>] On Behalf Of David Blaikie via cfe-dev
Sent: Friday, October 30, 2015 8:07 PM
To: Dave Bartolomeo
Cc: llvm-dev; Clang Dev
Subject: Re: [cfe-dev] [llvm-dev] RFC: CodeView debug info emission in Clang/LLVM

Brief answer, but can go into detail later:

If this is the right idea, lets do it for dwarf too & generalize the support to work for both. It's certainly something we've considered, to save all the complexity of representing essentially static data in an intermediate form.

That said, given some of the stuff we have for lto, for example (deallocating/merging types etc) I'm not sure that's obviously the right strategy.

Mangled names for types don't seem like a hugely difficult feature. We already support mangled names for function debug info in dwarf. We already have the mangled name of a type in the metadata, it could be used for codeview emission.

It might be worth talking more & considering what other language features codeview uses that we haven't already plumbed through for dwarf (& dwarf based debuggers use dwarf for expression evaluation too, fwiw)
On Oct 30, 2015 5:12 PM, "Dave Bartolomeo via cfe-dev" <cfe-dev at lists.llvm.org<mailto:cfe-dev at lists.llvm.org>> wrote:

From: Saleem Abdulrasool [mailto:compnerd at compnerd.org<mailto:compnerd at compnerd.org>]
Sent: Thursday, October 29, 2015 10:02 PM
To: Adrian Prantl <aprantl at apple.com<mailto:aprantl at apple.com>>
Cc: Dave Bartolomeo <Dave.Bartolomeo at microsoft.com<mailto:Dave.Bartolomeo at microsoft.com>>; llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org<mailto:llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org>; cfe-dev at lists.llvm.org<mailto:cfe-dev at lists.llvm.org>
Subject: Re: [llvm-dev] RFC: CodeView debug info emission in Clang/LLVM

On Thu, Oct 29, 2015 at 2:08 PM, Adrian Prantl via llvm-dev <llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org<mailto:llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org>> wrote:

> On Oct 29, 2015, at 10:11 AM, Dave Bartolomeo via llvm-dev <llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org<mailto:llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org>> wrote:
>
> Proposed Design
> How Debug Info is Generated
> The CodeView type records for a compilation unit will be generated by the front-end for the source language (Clang, in the case of C and C++). The front-end has access to the full type system and AST of the language, which is necessary to generate accurate debug type info. The type records will be represented as metadata in the LLVM IR, similar to how DWARF debug info is represented. I’ll cover the actual representation in a bit more detail below.
> The LLVM back-end will be responsible for emitting the CodeView type records from the IR into the output .obj file. Since the type records will already be in the correct format, this is essentially just a copy. No inspection of the type records is necessary within LLVM. The back-end will also be responsible for generating CodeView symbol records, line numbers, and source file info for any functions and data defined in the compilation unit. The back-end is the logical place to do this because only the back-end knows the code addresses, data addresses, and stack frame layouts.

Thanks for proposing this.

How different are the type records from the type information we currently have in LLVM's DIType hierarchy? Would it be feasible to move the logic for generating type records from LLVM metadata into the backend? This way a frontend could be agnostic about the debug information format.

I think that this really is the path we want to follow.  If the current metadata we emit is insufficient, we should augment it with additional information sufficient to generate the necessary data in the backend.  The same annotations would then be able able to generate one OR both debug info formats.

[dB] I considered that approach, but I see a few reasons why I don’t think making the debug metadata format agnostic would work out very well. To ensure that the backed can generate both debug formats by itself, we need to make the metadata contain enough information from the original AST for the format-specific code in the backend to generate the debug info. I believe that in practice, we’d wind up having to encode a significant portion of the AST (for decls of types and members, at least) into metadata, because debug type info, at least in CodeView, strives for pretty close fidelity with the declarations and types in the original source language. The CodeView debug type info is used by the VS debugger to parse and evaluate C++ expressions while debugging. We currently have a bunch of limitations in our debugger’s expression evaluation due to information missing from the debug type info, and we’ll probably attempt to preserve even more of that information going forward. There’s not much information from the AST that we can ignore if we want to reach that goal. Of course, we could just accept that we need the majority of the AST for type and function declarations in the debug metadata, and do that work in order to avoid having the frontend know about debug info formats, but that just means that now the backend code that generates the debug info has to know about all of the source language-specific constructs that it’s reading when creating the debug info. I think I’d rather have Clang have to understand the language-specific parts of multiple debug info formats than have LLVM understand language-specific metadata.

As an example, the CodeView definition of a user-defined type requires both the mangled name of the type and the non-mangled “display name” of the type. Both of these require a fair bit of information from the AST to generate. For the mangled name in particular, there’s already code in Clang that generates this. If we want the backend to do this instead, we have to stuff a bunch of AST info into metadata, and then figure out how to share the name mangling code between Clang (where it operates on actual ASTs) and LLVM (where it would operate on metadata). If, instead, we have Clang compute the mangled name and display name and pass those names in the metadata, we’re not being particularly format-agnostic in Clang, and if the current compilation is only generating DWARF, we didn’t really need to compute or store those potentially large strings for every type anyway.

Whether Clang is format-agnostic or not, there will have to be some component that converts from something format-agnostic (either ASTs or metadata) to DWARF, and some component that converts from ASTs or metadata to CodeView. You can put those two components in Clang and accept that Clang won’t be format-agnostic. Or, you can put those two components in LLVM, which leaves Clang as format-agnostic but requires that LLVM be more source language-aware. It also requires a third component to translate ASTs into metadata to pass to LLVM. Letting Clang worry about two different debug type info formats seems preferable to writing additional code and making an LLVM component understand more about the source language.

Is there another approach I haven’t thought of that would let us wind up with a cleaner solution? I’ve only been working with the Clang and LLVM debug info code for a few months, so my knowledge of the existing design is far from complete.

Note that for the rest of debug info (line numbers, source files, stack layouts, etc.), I don’t think the frontend should have to worry about the debug info format, and the current design for those pieces is just fine. It’s only the type info that I think is source language-specific enough to justify computing it in the frontend.

-- adrian
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--
Saleem Abdulrasool
compnerd (at) compnerd (dot) org

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