Re: [PATCH 0/8] Non-contiguous address range support

Kevin Buettner
2018-07-17T02:00:43Z

On Thu, 12 Jul 2018 15:12:15 -0400
Simon Marchi <simon.marchi@ericsson.com> wrote:

> On 2018-06-26 02:32 AM, Kevin Buettner wrote:
> > This eight part patch sequence adds (further) support for
> > non-contiguous address ranges to GDB.
> >
> > This sequence of patches was motivated by GCC bug 84550:
> >
> > https://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=84550
> >
> > There is a test case posted to that bug along with some analysis of
> > the underlying problem.
> >
> > There is also a GDB bug for the same issue; it's 23021, but at the
> > moment, there is little there aside from a link to the GCC bug
> > mentioned above. But here's a link anyway:
> >
> > https://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=23021
> >
> > A quick synopsis of the problem is as follows...
> >
> > Recent versions of gcc can generate code in which a function is split
> > into at least two non-contiguous address ranges. As I understand it,
> > the idea here is to separate code which gcc does not expect to execute
> > in normal operation from the rest of the code. Doing this may result
> > in better cache locality for the normal case. The generated code for
> > the example in GCC bug 84550 separated a call to abort() from the rest
> > of the code comprising the function.
> >
> > In the course of my investigation, I identified at least four
> > problems:
> >
> > 1) Stepping into a function from a function which occupies non-contiguous
> > address ranges does not always work. It was not uncommon to see the
> > program run to completion when attempting to do a step.
> >
> > 2) Setting a breakpoint on a function with non-contiguous address ranges
> > causes a breakpoint to be placed on more than one location. When a
> > breakpoint is set on the "cold" address range, this is almost certainly
> > incorrect. The breakpoint should instead be set only on code near the
> > entry point(s).
> >
> > 3) The disassemble command did not work correctly. E.g. here is what I
> > found during my analysis of 84550:
> >
> > (gdb) x/i 'main.cold.0'
> > 0x4010e0 <main()>: mov %rax,%rdi
> > (gdb) x/i main
> > 0x4011a0 : push %r12
> > (gdb) disassemble main
> > Dump of assembler code for function main():
> > 0x00000000004010e0 <+0>: mov %rax,%rdi
> > ...
> > [No addresses starting at 0x4011a0 are shown]
> >
> > 4) Display of addresses associated with the non-contiguous function are
> > confusing. E.g. in the above example, note that GDB thinks that
> > the address associated with main.cold.0 is <main()>, but that there's
> > also a minsym called main which is displayed as .
> >
> > There are probably several other problems which are related those
> > identified above.
> >
> > I discovered that the stepping problem could be "fixed" by disabling
> > the find_pc_partial_function cache. This cache keeps track of the
> > most recent result (of calling find_pc_partial_function). If
> > find_pc_partial_function is called with an address which falls within
> > the cache range, then that's considered to be a cache hit and the most
> > recent result is returned. Obviously, this won't work correctly for
> > functions which occupy non-contiguous (disjoint) address ranges where
> > other functions might be placed in the gap.
> >
> > So one of the problems that needed to be solved was to make the
> > caching code work correctly. It is interesting to note that stepping
> > _did_ work when the cache was disabled. This is/was due to GDB
> > already having some (albeit incomplete) support for non-contiguous
> > addresses in the form of blockvector address maps. Code responsible
> > for mapping addresses to blocks (which form the lower levels of
> > find_pc_partial_function) handle this case correctly.
> >
> > To solve the problem of incorrect disassembly, we need to be able
> > to iterate over all of the ranges associated with a block.
> >
> > Finally, we need to distinguish between the entry pc and the lowest
> > address in a block. I discovered that this lack of distinction was
> > the cause of the remainder of the bugs including some which seemed to
> > be introduced by fixing the problems noted above. Once this
> > distinction is made, it will be straightforward to add full support for
> > DW_AT_entry_pc. I considered adding this support as part of this
> > patch series, but decided to wait until the community weighs in on my
> > work thus far...
> >
>
> Hi Kevin,
>
> I just started looking into this, but I already have a question, just for
> the sake of the discussion. After reading this description and the first
> few patches, it seems to me like one "cheap" way to fix the caching issue
> would be to record the contiguous portion of the address range instead
> of the low/high of the complete block.
>
> So if we have this:
>
> [0x100,0x110) function_a
> [0x110,0x120) function_b
> [0x120,0x130) function_a.cold
>
> When probing for pc = 0x104, we currently save:
>
> cache_pc_function_low = 0x100
> cache_pc_function_high = 0x130
>
> But instead we would save;
>
> cache_pc_function_low = 0x100
> cache_pc_function_high = 0x110
>
> I assume that the usage pattern of find_pc_partial_function is querying
> multiple times the same pc, or pc in increasing order (e.g. when
> disassembling). This modification wouldn't change the efficiency of
> the cache in these situations.
>
> Your solution of recording address ranges for blocks is more complete
> and probably necessary for other use cases, I am not questioning that,
> but I wanted to know if you had first tried a simpler solution similar
> to the above.
>
> Simon

Hi Simon,

I haven't tried the simpler caching approach that you outline above.
It seems like it should work and it would definitely make checking for
whether or not something is in the cache simpler.

I'll give it a try and run the test suite to see if there's a problem with
doing it that way.

Thanks,

Kevin