[Dwarf-Discuss] implementing SFN, support for multiple views per PC

[Alexandre Oliva]

On Sep  9, 2016, Alexandre Oliva <aoliva at redhat.com> wrote:

> SFN stands for Statement Frontier Notes, a technique I specified several
> years ago and presented at the GCC Summit to allow for finer-grained
> location information, so as to enable debug information consumers to
> compute/observe multiple views of an underlying program's state at the
> same program counter.  More specifically, it would enable debuggers to
> single-step over source code lines even though no actual instructions
> were generated between the recommended breakpoints for those lines.
> For some more details about the idea, please have a look at the paper
> and the slides of the presentation at
> http://people.redhat.com/aoliva/papers/sfn/

> TL;DR: each state in the source program's execution in the target
> language's virtual machine amounts to a view of the program state.  The
> idea is to assign identifiers to (some) such views, and to add those
> view identifiers to the line number table and to location lists.  This
> message is about how to do accomplish that in a compact and
> backward-compatible way.


Here is a proposal of extension to support location views that I would
like to submit for inclusion in DWARF 6.


View numbers
------------

A new column name "view" is added to the line number table.  It gets its
own register, computed as follows.

After appending a row to the line number matrix, the view register is
incremented.

Every opcode that changes the address register (but not the op_index),
except for DW_LNS_fixed_advance_pc, resets the view register to zero at
the time the address register is changed.

Rationale: we just need view numbers to be unique within the same
address, as a fractional part.  They might even be unique per op_index,
but location lists represent addresses, so opcodes that advance only
op_index will only reset the view when they advance the address, e.g. by
exceeding maximum_operations_per_instruction in op_index.
DW_LNS_fixed_advance_pc is available for compilers to use when an
address changes is uncertain, e.g., when advancing past opcodes that may
expand to an empty sequence, e.g. possibly-empty alignment sequences,
optional no-operation opcodes or the like.


View lists
----------

A DIE with a DW_AT_location list may also have a DW_AT_locviews
attribute referencing a viewlist table.

For each range in the location list (not its terminator), the viewlist
should contain a corresponding pair of entries, one corresponding to the
views that start and end the range.  Each view is encoded as a separate
uleb128 quantity.

Each pair (address,view), formed by combining corresponding a beginning
or end address from the location list with the corresponding view from
the locviews view list, identifies the actual beginning or end of a
view-augmented location list.

Location lists that do not have a corresponding locviews list can be
augmented by combining each one of its range addresses with a view
number zero.  A locviews list whose entries are all zero is equivalent
to an omitted locviews list.


How's this to get the discussion on this extension started?

This is implemented in GCC, GIT branch aoliva/SFN.  binutils+gdb branch
users/aoliva/SFN has gas support for '.loc ... view' so as to generate
more compact line number programs than GCC can on its own.

-- 
Alexandre Oliva, freedom fighter    http://FSFLA.org/~lxoliva/
You must be the change you wish to see in the world. -- Gandhi
Be Free! -- http://FSFLA.org/   FSF Latin America board member
Free Software Evangelist|Red Hat Brasil GNU Toolchain Engineer