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			154 lines
		
	
	
		
			5.7 KiB
		
	
	
	
		
			HTML
		
	
	
	
	
	
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN"
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                      "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">
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<head>
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  <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
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  <title>Debugging JITed Code With GDB</title>
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  <link rel="stylesheet" href="llvm.css" type="text/css">
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</head>
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<body>
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<h1>Debugging JITed Code With GDB</h1>
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<ol>
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  <li><a href="#example">Example usage</a></li>
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  <li><a href="#background">Background</a></li>
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</ol>
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<div class="doc_author">Written by Reid Kleckner</div>
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<!--=========================================================================-->
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<h2><a name="example">Example usage</a></h2>
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<!--=========================================================================-->
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<div>
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<p>In order to debug code JITed by LLVM, you need GDB 7.0 or newer, which is
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available on most modern distributions of Linux.  The version of GDB that Apple
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ships with XCode has been frozen at 6.3 for a while.  LLDB may be a better
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option for debugging JITed code on Mac OS X.
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</p>
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<p>Consider debugging the following code compiled with clang and run through
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lli:
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</p>
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<pre class="doc_code">
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#include <stdio.h>
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void foo() {
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    printf("%d\n", *(int*)NULL);  // Crash here
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}
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void bar() {
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    foo();
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}
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void baz() {
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    bar();
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}
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int main(int argc, char **argv) {
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    baz();
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}
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</pre>
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<p>Here are the commands to run that application under GDB and print the stack
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trace at the crash:
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</p>
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<pre class="doc_code">
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# Compile foo.c to bitcode.  You can use either clang or llvm-gcc with this
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# command line.  Both require -fexceptions, or the calls are all marked
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# 'nounwind' which disables DWARF exception handling info.  Custom frontends
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# should avoid adding this attribute to JITed code, since it interferes with
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# DWARF CFA generation at the moment.
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$ clang foo.c -fexceptions -emit-llvm -c -o foo.bc
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# Run foo.bc under lli with -jit-emit-debug.  If you built lli in debug mode,
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# -jit-emit-debug defaults to true.
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$ $GDB_INSTALL/gdb --args lli -jit-emit-debug foo.bc
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...
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# Run the code.
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(gdb) run
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Starting program: /tmp/gdb/lli -jit-emit-debug foo.bc
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[Thread debugging using libthread_db enabled]
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Program received signal SIGSEGV, Segmentation fault.
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0x00007ffff7f55164 in foo ()
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# Print the backtrace, this time with symbols instead of ??.
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(gdb) bt
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#0  0x00007ffff7f55164 in foo ()
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#1  0x00007ffff7f550f9 in bar ()
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#2  0x00007ffff7f55099 in baz ()
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#3  0x00007ffff7f5502a in main ()
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#4  0x00000000007c0225 in llvm::JIT::runFunction(llvm::Function*,
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    std::vector<llvm::GenericValue,
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    std::allocator<llvm::GenericValue> > const&) ()
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#5  0x00000000007d6d98 in
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    llvm::ExecutionEngine::runFunctionAsMain(llvm::Function*,
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    std::vector<std::string,
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    std::allocator<std::string> > const&, char const* const*) ()
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#6  0x00000000004dab76 in main ()
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</pre>
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<p>As you can see, GDB can correctly unwind the stack and has the appropriate
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function names.
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</p>
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</div>
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<!--=========================================================================-->
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<h2><a name="background">Background</a></h2>
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<!--=========================================================================-->
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<div>
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<p>Without special runtime support, debugging dynamically generated code with
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GDB (as well as most debuggers) can be quite painful.  Debuggers generally read
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debug information from the object file of the code, but for JITed code, there is
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no such file to look for.
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</p>
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<p>Depending on the architecture, this can impact the debugging experience in
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different ways.  For example, on most 32-bit x86 architectures, you can simply
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compile with -fno-omit-frame-pointer for GCC and -disable-fp-elim for LLVM.
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When GDB creates a backtrace, it can properly unwind the stack, but the stack
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frames owned by JITed code have ??'s instead of the appropriate symbol name.
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However, on Linux x86_64 in particular, GDB relies on the DWARF call frame
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address (CFA) debug information to unwind the stack, so even if you compile
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your program to leave the frame pointer untouched, GDB will usually be unable
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to unwind the stack past any JITed code stack frames.
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</p>
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<p>In order to communicate the necessary debug info to GDB, an interface for
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registering JITed code with debuggers has been designed and implemented for
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GDB and LLVM.  At a high level, whenever LLVM generates new machine code, it
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also generates an object file in memory containing the debug information.  LLVM
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then adds the object file to the global list of object files and calls a special
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function (__jit_debug_register_code) marked noinline that GDB knows about.  When
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GDB attaches to a process, it puts a breakpoint in this function and loads all
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of the object files in the global list.  When LLVM calls the registration
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function, GDB catches the breakpoint signal, loads the new object file from
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LLVM's memory, and resumes the execution.  In this way, GDB can get the
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necessary debug information.
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</p>
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<p>At the time of this writing, LLVM only supports architectures that use ELF
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object files and it only generates symbols and DWARF CFA information.  However,
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it would be easy to add more information to the object file, so we don't need to
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coordinate with GDB to get better debug information.
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</p>
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</div>
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<!-- *********************************************************************** -->
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<hr>
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<address>
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  <a href="mailto:reid.kleckner@gmail.com">Reid Kleckner</a><br>
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  <a href="http://llvm.org/">The LLVM Compiler Infrastructure</a><br>
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  Last modified: $Date$
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</address>
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