[llvm-dev] Kill "KillTheDoctor"

[Hans Wennborg via llvm-dev]

On Mon, Jun 8, 2020 at 5:33 PM Saleem Abdulrasool via llvm-dev
<llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org> wrote:
>
> On Sun, Jun 7, 2020 at 6:19 PM Chris Lattner via llvm-dev <llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org> wrote:
>>
>> +Saleem as one of the people who know a lot about Windows.
>>
>> I don’t have any technical insight on this, but if we can, it would be great to drop this.
>>
>> -Chris
>>
>> > On Jun 7, 2020, at 12:44 AM, Michael Kruse via llvm-dev <llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org> wrote:
>> >
>> > We still have the program called "KillTheDoctor" [1] in our source
>> > tree. Its original intention was to stop requiring user interaction
>> > for crashing regression tests under Windows (infamous Dr. Watson,
>> > nowadays "[program] has stopped working" [2]), I don't think it is
>> > useful anymore. It's also a very hacky approach, as admitted in the
>> > source comment itself ("I hate Windows.")
>> >
>> > I don't think it was the right approach in the first place. Today,
>> > LLVM tools disable error reporting themselves [3,4].
>> > SEM_NO­GP­FAULT­ERROR­BOX [5] can be passed when launching arbitrary
>> > programs with error reporting disabled.
>> >
>> > The only reference to it in the current source tree is compiler-rt [6]
>> > and explicitly mentions it should be integrated with "not --crash".
>> > However, it apparently already handles this case [7] and is already
>> > used outside of compiler-rt, eg. [8]. Removing the special case for
>> > Windows in [6] still passes the tests on my Windows machine (at least
>> > check-asan and check-builtins).
>> >
>> > Therefore, I propose to remove KillTheDoctor.
>
>
> At this point, the expected environment is pretty much Windows 10.  That is plenty new enough to support the use of `SetThreadErrorMode`.  I don't see a strong reason to use the DebugAPI to trace the process when we can ensure that we set the error mode properly in `LLVMInitializeCore`.   This seems pretty reasonable to me.  I think that conferring with Ried and Nico is a good idea to ensure that the chrome team doesn't have any issues with this.

I don't expect this would cause any problems for Chromium's infra.

 - Hans