drgn is currently licensed as GPLv3+. Part of the long term vision for
drgn is that other projects can use it as a library providing
programmatic interfaces for debugger functionality. A more permissive
license is better suited to this goal. We decided on LGPLv2.1+ as a good
balance between software freedom and permissiveness.
All contributors not employed by Meta were contacted via email and
consented to the license change. The only exception was the author of
commit c4fbf7e589 ("libdrgn: fix for compilation error"), who did not
respond. That commit reverted a single line of code to one originally
written by me in commit 640b1c011d ("libdrgn: embed DWARF index in
DWARF info cache").
Signed-off-by: Omar Sandoval <osandov@osandov.com>
drgn was originally my side project, but for awhile now it's also been
my work project. Update the copyright headers to reflect this, and add a
copyright header to various files that were missing it.
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.
The current mixed Python/C implementation works well, but it has a
couple of important limitations:
- It's too slow for some common use cases, like iterating over large
data structures.
- It can't be reused in utilities written in other languages.
This replaces the internals with a new library written in C, libdrgn. It
includes Python bindings with mostly the same public interface as
before, with some important improvements:
- Types are now represented by a single Type class rather than the messy
polymorphism in the Python implementation.
- Qualifiers are a bitmask instead of a set of strings.
- Bit fields are not considered a separate type.
- The lvalue/rvalue terminology is replaced with reference/value.
- Structure, union, and array values are better supported.
- Function objects are supported.
- Program distinguishes between lookups of variables, constants, and
functions.
The C rewrite is about 6x as fast as the original Python when using the
Python bindings, and about 8x when using the C API directly.
Currently, the exposed API in C is fairly conservative. In the future,
the memory reader, type index, and object index APIs will probably be
exposed for more flexibility.
