A trace might contain events traced during the target's execution. For
example, a thread might be paused for some period of time due to context
switches or breakpoints, which actually force a context switch. Not only
that, a trace might be paused because the CPU decides to trace only a
specific part of the target, like the address filtering provided by
intel pt, which will cause pause events. Besides this case, other kinds
of events might exist.
This patch adds the method `TraceCursor::GetEvents()`` that returns the
list of events that happened right before the instruction being pointed
at by the cursor. Some refactors were done to make this change simpler.
Besides this new API, the instruction dumper now supports the -e flag
which shows pause events, like in the following example, where pauses
happened due to breakpoints.
```
thread #1: tid = 2717361
a.out`main + 20 at main.cpp:27:20
0: 0x00000000004023d9 leaq -0x1200(%rbp), %rax
[paused]
1: 0x00000000004023e0 movq %rax, %rdi
[paused]
2: 0x00000000004023e3 callq 0x403a62 ; std::vector<int, std::allocator<int> >::vector at stl_vector.h:391:7
a.out`std::vector<int, std::allocator<int> >::vector() at stl_vector.h:391:7
3: 0x0000000000403a62 pushq %rbp
4: 0x0000000000403a63 movq %rsp, %rbp
```
The `dump info` command has also been updated and now it shows the
number of instructions that have associated events.
Differential Revision: https://reviews.llvm.org/D123982
D104422 added the interface for TraceCursor, which is the main way to traverse instructions in a trace. This diff implements the corresponding cursor class for Intel PT and deletes the now obsolete code.
Besides that, the logic for the "thread trace dump instructions" was adapted to use this cursor (pretty much I ended up moving code from Trace.cpp to TraceCursor.cpp). The command by default traverses the instructions backwards, and if the user passes --forwards, then it's not forwards. More information about that is in the Options.td file.
Regarding the Intel PT cursor. All Intel PT cursors for the same thread share the same DecodedThread instance. I'm not yet implementing lazy decoding because we don't need it. That'll be for later. For the time being, the entire thread trace is decoded when the first cursor for that thread is requested.
Differential Revision: https://reviews.llvm.org/D105531
As a follow up of D103588, I'm reinitiating the discussion with a new proposal for traversing instructions in a trace which uses the feedback gotten in that diff.
See the embedded documentation in TraceCursor for more information. The idea is to offer an OOP way to traverse instructions exposing a minimal interface that makes no assumptions on:
- the number of instructions in the trace (i.e. having indices for instructions might be impractical for gigantic intel-pt traces, as it would require to decode the entire trace). This renders the use of indices to point to instructions impractical. Traces are big and expensive, and the consumer should try to do look linear lookups (forwards and/or backwards) and avoid random accesses (the API could be extended though, but for now I want to dicard that funcionality and leave the API extensible if needed).
- the way the instructions are represented internally by each Trace plug-in. They could be mmap'ed from a file, exist in plain vector or generated on the fly as the user requests the data.
- the actual data structure used internally for each plug-in. Ideas like having a struct TraceInstruction have been discarded because that would make the plug-in follow a certain data type, which might be costly. Instead, the user can ask the cursor for each independent property of the instruction it's pointing at.
The way to get a cursor is to ask Trace.h for the end or being cursor or a thread's trace.
There are some benefits of this approach:
- there's little cost to create a cursor, and this allows for lazily decoding a trace as the user requests data.
- each trace plug-in could decide how to cache the instructions it generates. For example, if a trace is small, it might decide to keep everything in memory, or if the trace is massive, it might decide to keep around the last thousands of instructions to speed up local searches.
- a cursor can outlive a stop point, which makes trace comparison for live processes feasible. An application of this is to compare profiling data of two runs of the same function, which should be doable with intel pt.
Differential Revision: https://reviews.llvm.org/D104422
