Currently, the only information available from a stack frame is the
program counter. Eventually, we'd like to add support for getting
arguments and local variables, but that will require more work. In the
mean time, we can at least get the values of other registers. A
determined user can read the assembly for the code they're debugging and
derive the values of variables from the registers.
In order to retrieve registers from stack traces, we need to know what
registers are defined for a platform. This adds a small DSL for defining
registers for an architecture. The DSL is parsed by an awk script that
generates the necessary tables, lookup functions, and enum definitions.
It's annoying to do obj.type_.size, and that doesn't even work for every
type. Add sizeof() that does the right thing whether it's given a Type
or Object.
Commit c0bc72b0ea ("libdrgn: use splay tree for memory reader")
changed the signature of add_memory_segment(), but I didn't update the
example that used it. Fix it, and while we're here make it take the
device on the command line.
Sometimes, I'd like to see all of the missing debug info errors rather
than just the first 5. Allow setting this through the
DRGN_MAX_DEBUG_INFO_ERRORS environment variable.
Currently, the interface between the DWARF index, libdwfl, and the code
which finds and reports vmlinux/kernel modules is spaghetti. The DWARF
index tracks Dwfl_Modules via their userdata. However, despite
conceptually being owned by the DWARF index, the reporting code reports
the Dwfl_Modules and sets up the userdata. These Dwfl_Modules and
drgn_dwfl_module_userdatas are messy to track and pass between the
layers.
This reworks the architecture so that the DWARF index owns the Dwfl
instance and files are reported to the DWARF index; the DWARF index
takes care of reporting to libdwfl internally. In addition to making the
interface for the reporter much cleaner, this improves a few things as a
side-effect:
- We now deduplicate on build ID in addition to path.
- We now skip searching for vmlinux and/or kernel modules if they were
already indexed.
- We now support compressed ELF files via libdwelf.
- We can now load default debug info at the same time as additional
debug info.
vmcores don't include program headers for special memory regions like
vmalloc and percpu. Instead, we need to walk the kernel page table to
map those addresses. Luckily, libkdumpfile already does that. So, if
drgn was built with libkdumpfile support, use it for ELF vmcores. Also
add an environment variable to override this behavior.
Closes#15.
Now that we have the bundled version of elfutils, build it from libdrgn
and link to it. We can also get rid of the elfutils version checks from
the libdrgn code.
We're too inconsistent with how we use these for them to be useful (and
it's impossible to distinguish between a format error and some other
error from libelf/libdw/libdwfl), so let's just get rid of them and make
it all DRGN_ERROR_OTHER/Exception.
For now, we only support stack traces for the Linux kernel (at least
v4.9) on x86-64, and we only support getting the program counter and
corresponding function symbol from each stack frame.
For stack trace support, we'll need to have some architecture-specific
functionality. drgn's current notion of an architecture doesn't actually
include the instruction set architecture. This change expands it to a
"platform", which includes the ISA as well as the existing flags.
Now that we're not overloading the name "symbol", we can define struct
drgn_symbol as a symbol table entry. For now, this is very minimal: it's
just a name, address, and size. We can then add a way to find the symbol
for a given address, drgn_program_find_symbol(). For now, this is only
supported through the actual ELF symbol tables. However, in the future,
we can probably support adding "symbol finders".
struct drgn_symbol doesn't really represent a symbol; it's just an
object which hasn't been fully initialized (see c2be52dff0 ("libdrgn:
rename object index to symbol index"), it used to be called a "partial
object"). For stack traces, we're going to have a notion of a symbol
that more closely represents an ELF symbol, so let's get rid of the
temporary struct drgn_symbol representation and just return an object
directly.
On many occasions, I've wanted to build and iterate on a script while
exploring in an interactive session. This has involved various
workarounds, like copy-and-paste of the work-in-progress script into the
REPL, using importlib.reload(), or adding code.interact() at the end of
the script. These workflows aren't very convenient.
Add execscript(), which runs a script as if it was run from the REPL,
adding all defined functions and variables to the global scope so that
iterating on the script further is easy.
The current array-based memory reader has a bug in the following
scenario:
prog.add_memory_segment(0xffff0000, 128, ...)
# This should replace a subset of the first segment.
prog.add_memory_segment(0xffff0020, 32, ...)
# This moves the first segment back to the front of the array.
prog.read(0xffff0000, 32)
# This finds the first segment instead of the second segment.
prog.read(0xffff0032, 32)
Fix it by using the newly-added splay tree. This also splits up the
virtual and physical memory segments into separate trees.
Currently, we load debug information for every kernel module that we
find under /lib/modules/$(uname -r)/kernel. This has a few issues:
1. Distribution kernels have lots of modules (~3000 for Fedora and
Debian).
a) This can exceed the default soft limit on the number of open file
descriptors.
b) The mmap'd debug information can trip the overcommit heuristics
and cause OOM kills.
c) It can take a long time to parse all of the debug information.
2. Not all modules are under the "kernel" directory; some distros also
have an "extra" directory.
3. The user is not made aware of loaded kernel modules that don't have
debug information available.
So, instead of walking /lib/modules, walk the list of loaded kernel
modules and look up their debugging information.
Currently, programs can be created for three main use-cases: core dumps,
the running kernel, and a running process. However, internally, the
program memory, types, and symbols are pluggable. Expose that as a
callback API, which makes it possible to use drgn in much more creative
ways.
drgn has pretty thorough in-program documentation, but it doesn't have a
nice overview or introduction to the basic concepts. This commit adds
that using Sphinx. In order to avoid documenting everything in two
places, the libdrgn bindings have their docstrings generated from the
API documentation. The alternative would be to use Sphinx's autodoc
extension, but that's not as flexible and would also require building
the extension to build the docs. The documentation for the helpers is
generated using autodoc and a small custom extension.
