[Bug runtime/4593] kread() functions should provide better error messages

[joshua dot i dot stone at intel dot com]

------- Additional Comments From joshua dot i dot stone at intel dot com  2007-06-07 01:09 -------
(In reply to comment #0)
> At the moment, all we get is "pointer dereference failed".
> We should also see the pointer value, and could enjoy even
> more information.

It's not really kread() creating the message, but the other convenience macro
CATCH_DEREF_FAULT().  The problem is that the underlying deref() macros use a
goto for error handling, so I can only have a single catch-point per function to
formulate an error message.  So it's often hard to know *which* pointer failed.

There are ways to get around that, but I'm not sure how to do it in a generic
way.  Probably the cleanest way is to fill in the error message right before the
goto in deref().  The dwarf accessors also call deref() -- would this change be
ok for those as well?

> The present tactic of setting context->last_error
> to a static unchanged string would have to change.  An easy
> improvement would be to statically allocate an new error_buffer
> string field in the context, which embedded-C code could sprintf
> into and incidentally use to set the context->last_error.

This is a good idea.

-- 


http://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=4593

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