linker debugger interface

[Ben Woodard]

On 06/10/2011 04:06 PM, Matthew LeGendre wrote:
>
> Ben,
>
> We appreciate you guys looking into this.  As Dong said, this is an 
> important debugger issue for us.  I have a concern and a question 
> about the fix.
>
>
> I think this fixes half of our problem.  As per the bug report we're 
> seeing too many library related debug events, most of which are 
> redudant. There were enough of these that one application took ~40 
> minutes to start under a debugger (down to ~12 minutes after the IBM 
> patch).
>
> There were two causes of these extra events:
> 1) Each library load triggered a 'before' and 'after' library load 
> event, when most debuggers just cared about the 'after'.
> 2) A call to dlopen would trigger a library load event, even when no 
> new library was loaded.
>
> The proposal seems to do a good job at fixing 1, but point 2 is also a 
> big issue.  Point 2 is motivated by a case where a specific 
> application is pre-linked with ~1000 shared libraries.  It tries to 
> dlopen these libraries at runtime (I believe to get their dlopen 
> handle).  These dlopen calls don't load an actual library, but they do 
> trigger a debugger event that leads to a re-parse of the library list.
>
> The IBM patch fixed this by triggering the debugger breakpoint only 
> after a library was actually loaded.  Would we be able to get the hook 
> in a similar location?
>
>
Let's see if we can add an additional probe point there so that we can 
take care of the case where an application dlopen's an already open library.
>
> As for the question, I'm curious about the implications of using 
> SystemTap to implement the debugger hooks.  Would we be able to 
> override the systemtap hooks from the application and point them at 
> our own probes?
I'm not sure that I understand your question. What are you trying to do?

If you install Fedora 15 and install the systemtap-sdt-devel package and 
look at /usr/include/sys/sdt.h you can see the assembly C & C++ macros 
that implement the user space probe points for systemtap.

To see how they are made available inside of gdb make sure that you 
install the gdb-doc package then "info gdb" and within the info document 
type "/5.1.9" to  go to the section directly or search for "/static 
probe points".

I kind of think what you are asking is how to define your own probe 
points within a library but I'm not sure.

>
> I'm asking because we had another issue where the application had poor 
> debugger performance when dlopen'ing many new libraries.  These were 
> correct debug events since a library was actually loading, but there 
> were still too many of them.  Under the IBM patch we could change the 
> application to disable debug when it was in its library loading phase, 
> then throw a single event when everything was complete.  I'm wondering if
> we can implement the same thing via systemtap.
Couldn't you do something like insert a SDT_PROBE immediately before and 
after all the loading is done and then tell gdb or whatever tool you are 
using to disable monitoring of the library loading until after the 
second probe. If that is what you are doing, then it seems like you are 
simply giving some semantic meaning to a particular set of probe points.

>
>
> Finally, the idea of getting system tap hooks into glibc is very cool. 
> There's a lot of information in there tool writers would love to get at.
My understanding is that they are low enough overhead that resistance to 
adding some that expose useful data won't be too excessive. It seems 
that the discussion regarding these is spread between 
archer@sourceware.org and libc-alpha@sourceware.org

-ben
>
>
> -Matt
>
>
> On Thu, 9 Jun 2011, Ahn, Dong H. wrote:
>>
>> Hi Ben,
>>
>>
>>
>> Yes, I remember this. This is a request to apply the fast dll 
>> interface to speed up debugging applications like KULL. I am glad 
>> there was some progress here. I will review the proposal and get back 
>> to you soon. Meantime, I want John Delsignore of Rogue Wave Software 
>> and Matt Legendre of LLNL to review this proposal as well. Both 
>> ccΒ’ed. I can tell you, though, this is a very important problem for 
>> LLNLΒ’s debugging environment.
>>
>>
>>
>> Best,
>>
>> Dong
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> From: Ben Woodard [mailto:woodard@redhat.com]
>> Sent: Thursday, June 09, 2011 8:59 AM
>> To: Dong Ahn
>> Cc: Matt Wolfe; Gyllenhaal, John C.; Travis Gummels
>> Subject: linker debugger interface
>>
>>
>>
>> Dong,
>> A while back you sent me some info on how to speed up TV and gdb on 
>> applications that have a huge number of dynamic libraries. The 
>> working document that you sent me begins with:
>>
>> Currently the dynamic linker has an interface used by gdb and 
>> Totalview (and possibly other tools) that is used to keep track of 
>> the current load state of the shared libraries used by the debugged 
>> program. The dynamic linker has defined a function called 
>> _dl_debug_state() and will call this function under various 
>> conditions. A debugger can then set a breakpoint on this function, 
>> stop at various points during a debugging session, and inspect the 
>> state of the shared libraries at that point. For purposes of this 
>> document, a debug event will refer to the set of operations that take 
>> place during a debugging session, when the debugger sets a break on 
>> this entry point, the breakpoint is hit, and some processing is done 
>> at that point.
>>
>> (Let me know if you need more of that document to refresh your memory.)
>>
>> The tools and libc developers have been working on the problem from a 
>> different direction.
>>
>> http://sourceware.org/ml/archer/2011-q2/msg00000.html  
>> http://sourceware.org/ml/archer/2011-q2/msg00015.html
>>
>> From my reading of it, it appears to solve your problem but in a 
>> different way. I wanted to verify that you concur and make sure that 
>> the Rogue Wave/TV people also are OK with the proposed solution (Matt 
>> can you take care of that?). If not, then I feel now is the time when 
>> I need to pass that back to Gary Benson to make sure that he 
>> understands the problems inherent in his approach.
>>
>> -ben
>>
>>
>>