Dwarf2-related Internal error

Michal Ludvig mludvig@suse.cz
Thu Aug 14 14:56:00 GMT 2003


Michal Ludvig told me that:
> Elena Zannoni told me that:
> 
>> I don't have much time to devote to this, but usually that kind of
>> error is generated by some infinite loop that gdb got itself into.
> 
> 
> Unlikely. The immediate problem is that the size of function's parameter 
> 'xx' is too big:
> 
> (top-gdb) f
> #0  read_var_value (var=0x8b35c0, frame=0x85ad98)
>     at ../../gdb-head/gdb/findvar.c:397
> 397       struct type *type = SYMBOL_TYPE (var);
> (top-gdb) p *var->type
> $2 = {pointer_type = 0x0, reference_type = 0x0, chain = 0x89fc00,
>   instance_flags = 0, length = 4294967292, main_type = 0x89fc28}
> (top-gdb) p (int)4294967292
> $3 = -4
> (top-gdb)
> 
> Very likely it was ment to be -4 because something somewhere in the 
> debug info was wrongly interpreted.

OK, I have found the problem. The type of the parameter 'xx' is an array 
with unspecified size. Lower bound is set to '1' for Fortran and since 
there is no upper bound specified, it's set to '-1' by default.

3097     else if (attr->form == DW_FORM_block1)
3098     {
3099       /* GCC encodes arrays with unspecified or dynamic length
3100          with a DW_FORM_block1 attribute.
3101          FIXME: GDB does not yet know how to handle dynamic
3102          arrays properly, treat them as arrays with unspecified
3103          length for now.  */
3104       high = -1;
3105     }

Later, when the actual size of the array type is computed, it takes the 
size of the main type (real, size=4) and multiplies it by 
(high-low+1=-1) leading to -4 which is quite a big number when converted 
to unsigned.

Now how to solve it. For now I did

                      length for now.  */
                   high = -1;
+                 if (cu_language == language_fortran)
+                   high = 0;
                 }

which at least prevents GDB from crashing. IMHO it achieves the same 
behaviour as for other languages, where low=0, high=-1 and so the size 
of the array results to 0. In fortran low=1, so with high=0 the size 
will become 0 as well.

Would this be an acceptable solution? Any comments?

Michal Ludvig
-- 
* SuSE CR, s.r.o     * mludvig@suse.cz
* (+420) 296.545.373 * http://www.suse.cz



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