2011 Multicore Debug Workgroup Minutes of Meetings

December 13th, 2011

Attendees

Phil Mason (Broadcom)
Mikhail Khodjaiants (Mentor)
Abeer Bagul (Tensilica)
Shaiju Nair (Tensilica)
Patrick Chuong (TI)
Bill Swanson (Tilera)
Pawel Piech (Windriver)
Marc Khouzam (Ericsson)

Minutes

General

Next call delayed one week due to holidays and since CDT monthly call will be delayed as well. Will be 17th of January

Visualizer view progress

Bug 335027
Talk accepted at EclipseCon Seeing is Understanding: Debugging with Multicore Visualizer
Marc just pushed changes to support dynamic updating of multicore visualizer for thread creation and exit
Marc to look at allowing the multicore visualizer to display when the launch or gdb node are selected
Bill to work on visualizer selection and synchronization with Debug View.
- DebugContextProvider can be used for any view to provide the debug context. This is important if someone uses the visualizer without the Debug view. The problem is that there is no API to drive the selection in the Debug View. There are two current options:
  1. Faking deltas like currently done in Tilera's Grid view. Pawel recommends this one, although it is still clumsy.
  2. Actually fetching the view and setting the selection.
- It is unclear if defining a formal API will be much simpler or worth the effort.
- We'll start with Deltas solution. We don't expect any changes required from Platform
- Using the new Global debug toolbar in platform
  1. There is a system property to know if the debug view toolbar is enabled or not
  2. It is better to use the command framework to contribute new buttons
  3. The global toolbar should work automatically for the Visualizer once it is a DebugContextProvider. However, if the Visualizer and Debug view are not synchronized, the debug tool bar will take the context from the currently active view; this can be quite confusing to the user. We really need to synchronize the two views.

Enhanced breakpoints

Windriver is working on the different bugs internally and will post something to the bugs once available

DSF Context persistence

Bug 306554 Add support to persist cast to type / view as array settings
New patch posted to provide context persistence

Expressions view additions

Enhancement to allow the expressions view to use Working Sets. The idea is to use Pin&Clone and Working sets to show only the expressions for a specific core (i.e. context)
Demo will be shown at the next multicore debug call

Grouping

Bug 336876
Mentor is interested in the feature. Mikhail will see if time can be allocated to complete it.

EclipseCon

Bill Swanson will attend and present
Marc Khouzam will attend and present
Can we have screensharing and phone conference for CDT day at EclipseCon?

November 8th, 2011

Attendees

Phil Mason (Broadcom)
Mikhail Khodjaiants (Mentor)
Bruce Griffith (Sage)
Abeer Bagul (Tensilica)
Shaiju Nair (Tensilica)
Bill Swanson (Tilera)
Marc Khouzam (Ericsson)

Minutes

Visualizer view progress

Bug 335027
More updates in GitHub for Multicore Visualizer. CPUs/Cores are shown, with threads overlayed on top.
Arbitrary number of CPUs/cores are supported with a automatic layout
Demo of Multicore Visualizer:
- We saw two cores on one CPU (that was the hardware on which the demo was running)
- Debugged a program with 5 threads, and we saw the threads move from one core to another as reported by DSF
- Resizing the view makes the cores larger/smaller as necessary
Works with open-source GDB 7.3 (actually should be fine with GDB >= 7.1)
Information on getting the code from GitHub can be found in the bug.
Talk proposal will be submitted for EclipseCon 2012 to present this work

Global debug toolbar in platform

With Platform M3, the Debug view will no longer have the resume/step/etc buttons in its own toolbar. Instead there will be a global debug toolbar.
This is great for multicore as we can share the global debug toolbar between the Debug view and the Visualizer view
Bug 258767 - [debug view][menu] support for top level debug toolbar

Enhanced breakpoints

Windriver will start using CDT breakpoints in their products and plan on adding the following features.

Bug 360280 - Reposition breakpoints when planted on invalid line
Bug 360291 - Allow user to edit line breakpoint file in properties dialog
Bug 360295 - Customize property dialog for editing breakpoints
Bug 360289 - Allow address breakpoint to be set on arbitrary expression
Bug 360588 - Allow user to edit all its properties prior to creating the breakpoint

DSF Context persistence

Proposal: New DSF service using context hierarchy to create a persistant id name for a context
Using this id to persist attributes of variables such as 'cast'
Prototype is available and will be posted to bugzilla

October 25th, 2011

Note: The meeting request was not properly sent to the community. Due to this, attendance was dramatically smaller. We will hold another meeting in two weeks. Apologies for the mistake.

Attendees

Abeer Bagul (Tensilica)
Marc Khouzam (Ericsson)

Minutes

DSF Context persistence

Tensilica needs to recognize a context as being the 'same' from one debug session to anohter. To do this, they propose to have a way to create a fully-qualified name for each DMContext.
Abeer and Marc discussed possible solutions. A combination of a new DSF service and a set of adapters seemed interesting.
Abeer will open a bug to describe the problem and the proposed solution.

Global debug toolbar in platform

With Platform M3, the Debug view will no longer have the resume/step/etc buttons in its own toolbar. Instead there will be a global debug toolbar.
This is great for multicore as we can share the global debug toolbar between the Debug view and the Visualizer view
Bug 258767 - [debug view][menu] support for top level debug toolbar

Visualizer view progress

Bug 335027
Some progress done with a preliminary screenshot of the look & feel

Enhanced breakpoints

Windriver will start using CDT breakpoints in their products and plan on adding the following features.

Bug 360280 - Reposition breakpoints when planted on invalid line
Bug 360291 - Allow user to edit line breakpoint file in properties dialog
Bug 360295 - Customize property dialog for editing breakpoints
Bug 360289 - Allow address breakpoint to be set on arbitrary expression
Bug 360588 - Allow user to edit all its properties prior to creating the breakpoint

September 27th, 2011

Attendees

Mikhail Khodjaiants (Mentor)
Shaiju Nair (Tensilica)
Patrick Chuong (TI)
Dobrin Alexiev (TI)
Bill Swanson (Tilera)
Pawel Piech (Windriver)
Marc Khouzam (Ericsson)

Minutes

General

Tensilica has submitted a patch to handle breakpoints from the console. Mikhail is reviewing the patch as time permits.
More patches will be submitted as progress is made

Mikhail is working on synchronized stepping using multiple debug sessions (multiple GDBs)
- Problems with selection policy. The idea is to keep a multi-selection after a step. This is not supported by the platform.
- Problems with Pin&Clone in GdbPinProvider
- Could be related to the multicore synchronized operation feature
- Tensilica does something similar but programatically by stepping all sessions when one session is stepped.

Tensilica has a need to handle expressions per context (core, etc) to avoid getting errors for every expression that does not apply.
Windriver have done a change that adds a 'context' to the expression definition and based on that, filtering can be done. The user has to specify if the new expression is to be global or specific, and then some meta data is automatically stored to allow for the filtering. It was felt a little cumbersome.

Grouping

Bug 336876
Mikhail is interested in this feature
Dobrin will have no time to work on it in the next month but can help someone else
Many details on wiki
Can someone else than Dobrin pick up where he left off? Mikhail may have some time in a couple of weeks

Enhanced breakpoints

No progress yet.

Visualizer

Bug 335027
Progress is being made using the GitHub repo
Marc takes care of the new DSF service needed. IGDBHardware and GDBHardware are defined and almost ready with basic functionality
Bill takes care of the graphical parts
Tensilica may be interested in extending the Multicore visualizer for their multicore setup
We are considering using 'layers' where we can add other types of information to an existing visualizer e.g., CPU utilization

August 30th, 2011

Attendees

Mikhail Khodjaiants (Mentor)
Eugene Ostroukhov (Nvidia)
Bruce Griffith (Sage)
Abeer Bagul (Tensilica)
Patrick Chuong (TI)
Dobrin Alexiev (TI)
Bill Swanson (Tilera)
Randy Rohrbach (Windriver)
Doug Schaefer (Windriver)
Shaiju Nair (Tensilica)
Marc Khouzam (Ericsson)

Minutes

General

Tensilica will soon start submitting patches from their DSF integration. They are mostly to help subclassing.
The multicore debug workgroup meetings will continue monthly

Grouping

Still planned for Juno
Tensilica is interested in getting this feature and can help

Visualizer

Work has started and Bill has the beginnings of a framework.
Discussion will be done in Bug 335027
How to handle collaboration with Bill (not a committer) for Visualizer effort
- CDT's move to Git was largely to allow for such collaboration
- Doug is there to help with this collaboration to help workout issues.
- Could use GitHub as there is some CDT infrastructure already
- EclipseLabs is another option
- Once the plugins are at a point where they can be contributed, we can push them to eclipse.org.
- Such an eclipse.org contribution will be fine even if the work is done by multiple companies; we just have to have the different contributors but their name in the copyright notice
Is this visualization limited to debugging or could it be extended to other aspects of CDT?
- For now, we focus on debug, but let's not close the door on other possibilities
First contribution:
- Two new plugins for the framework: org.eclipse.cdt.visualizer.core and org.eclipse.cdt.visualizer.ui
- Separate example (reference implementation) plugins to create a visualizer that will be part of CDT
First Visualizer suggestions/requirements?
- Restrict to information that is available from GDB
- Could use the two dimension ability to show process and threads, maybe cores, to improve on the tree view of the Debug view
- Selection of entities
- Grouping of entities
- Reporting state of entities using colors and labels
- Debug view is not scalable enough. Nvidia has to deal with thousands of threads. Filtering would be useful. The Visualizer view could be used to select which threads should be shown in the Debug view.
  - How will the user identify threads of interest on the Visualizer? The visualizer view will need to show more information, such as hardware location and such.
- Highlighting of cores that have stopped due to a breakpoint would be nice for Tensilica (synchronized debugging)
- If interested parties can include usecases on the wiki or the bug, it will help determine what features are common and useful
Using DSF?
- Yes, within the example plugins. Integration with DSF-GDB.
- As a second example we could have a non-debug example of how to use framework. This would be a separate effort though.

Enhanced breakpoints

No progress

July 26th, 2011

Attendees

Mikhail Khodjaiants (Mentor)
Bruce Griffith (Sage)
Shaiju Nair (Tensilica)
Dobrin Alexiev (TI)
Bill Swanson (Tilera)
Randy Rohrbach (Windriver)
Marc Khouzam (Ericsson)

Minutes

General

Shaiju working on synchronizing breakpoints between gdb console and UI.
- Bug 308385
- Shaiju will post a patch when ready.
- Mikhail is hoping to be able to review.
- The solution will be based on the CDI approach because support for older GDBs is needed for Tensilica.
- For newer GDBs (>= 7.3), which are not yet available, we will have breakpoint events we can use.

Visualizer

Bill has implemented a first draft of the framework APIs as plugins
Has reimplemented Tilera's existing Grid View on top of these APIs
Will need a generic Presentation (hopefully based on DSF) to be able to see things with Vanilla CDT
Will need to look at SelectionProvider platform API for context selection
Next step is to review current state of implementation
Marc to work on this feature with Bill starting end of August

Grouping

Dobrin is working on TI's product for the next month and won't have time to work on this until then
Marc to look at the patch end of August or September
Abeer expects to also be able to help out around August
Dobrin is also working on run control operation for multiple selections
- Fine tuning needed to know what to do if the different selections are of different types (thread/process/stack)

Enhanced breakpoints

Tensilica has a new dialog to specify a core when setting a breakpoint a bit like thread-specific breakpoint. Core-specific breakpoints fit right into the enhanced breakpoint feature.
Interest still high, but no time made available yet.

June 21st, 2011

Attendees

Mikhail Khodjaiants (Mentor)
Patrick Chuong (TI)
Bill Swanson (Tilera)
Doug Schaefer (Windriver)
Abeer Bagul (Tensilica)
Marc Khouzam (Ericsson)

Minutes

TI integrating Indigo before looking at next steps for muticore features
Tensilica still porting to DSF-GDB but is planning on helping get the Grouping feature ready for CDT
Ericsson planning on focusing on Grouping and Visualizer features in the coming months

Grouping

Marc expects to have time to get back to this in August
Abeer expects to also be able to help out around that time

Visualizer

Bill is making good progress in moving to more recent CDT
Almost ready to start working on visualizer
Two approaches:

port tilera-view to recent CDT and then generalize to define framework
first design the general visualizer framework and then build Tilera's Grid view on top of it

ready to have dedicated talks about this effort
Bill and Marc prepared to spend time on this effort, others welcome

OS-Awareness

Feature has been developed but not yet contributed to open-source

Global breakpoints

Have been proposed on GDB mailing list: http://sourceware.org/ml/gdb-patches/2011-06/msg00163.html
Once part of GDB, we will need to integrated in CDT

Enhanced Breakpoint support

Feature of high interest, but needs a champion

May 24th, 2011

Attendees

Mikhail Khodjaiants (Mentor)
Dobrin Alexiev (TI)
Patrick Chuong (TI)
Randy Rohrbach (Windriver)
Shaiju Nair (Tensilica)
Marc Khouzam (Ericsson)

Minutes

Grouping

Tensilica trying to get multi-core working on their own platform. Some issues with Debug view updates. Tried grouping patch with HEAD with good success. Now needs to adapt it for Tensilica's changes.
Dobrin is hoping to resume work on the Grouping effort once the Indigo release is done and the branch is available for new features.

Enhanced breakpoints

TI does not have the resources to lead this effort, but can be part of discussions.
It would be nice to find a champion for this feature
First step is to list requirements on wiki and agree on features of interest. After that we can divide the effort between different people, to make it easier.

April 26th, 2011

Attendees

Mikhail Khodjaiants (Mentor)
Shaiju Nair (Tensilica)
Dobrin Alexiev (TI)
Patrick Chuong (TI)
Marc Khouzam (Ericsson)

Minutes

Meeting schedule

Because people are very busy with the Indigo release, we will have montly meetings until things pick up on the multicore front. Next meeting on the 24th of May.

Grouping

Only the last patch of bug 336876 needs to be applied.
The user has to set an environment variable GDB_DEBUG_VIEW_GROUPS to 1 to use the feature
If the user selects 2 or more elements in the debug view, and right-clicks, he will see "Group" and "Ungroup"

April 12th, 2011

Attendees

Norman Yee (Analog Devices)
Ken Ryall (Nokia)
Bruce Griffith (Sage)
Dobrin Alexiev (TI)
Patrick Chuong (TI)
Bill Swanson (Tilera)
Doug Schaefer (Windriver)
Marc Khouzam (Ericsson)

Minutes

EclipseCon meeting comments

Very good meeting with lost of interest.
Scaling of CDTs current features is not enough. The new features being discussed are essential.
Lots of work needed to address all issues
Visualization is key
Some of these new features push the limits of the existing architecture and we should address those at an architecture level.

Status

Dobrin continues to work on grouping but having many issues with changing context-hierarchy. Changes are pretty big and may not be safe for the Indigo release.
Patrick is interested looking at enhanced breakpoint feature. We need to start a discussion and propose features
Marc has been working on Multi-process. CDT will support automatically attaching to forked processes. For example, to debug the Chrome browser where each tab is a process, DSF-GDB will allow to automatically start debugging any new tab that is forked.

Visualizer view

Bill would like to get his builds to work properly with the newer eclipse before looking at Visualizer view
We should get more information about Coherent Logix' visual view as input for the Visualizer
Nicely using colors but not relying solely on them will need to be discussed
Zest has promising features, especially for graphs

Plans for Indigo

Get multi-process all fixed for Indigo
Grouping will probably not make it due to the large impact of changes

Plans post-Indigo (Juno)

Enhanced breakpoints
Visualizer. When work will start is unclear yet.
Other features as people get time allocated.

March 23rd, 2011 - EclipseCon Workshop

We had a special meeting at EclipseCon where we were able to meet face-to-face. We talked about many different things and the discussions where very interesting although we covered so many topics, I had trouble keeping track.

Fundamental points to note:

There is a lot of interest in this effort. Many companies do similar things and would like to unify them in CDT.
The problem is vast and complex. Requirements need to be clarified. Discussions need to continue.

Attendees

Tim Cook (Coherent Logix)
John Cortell (Freescale)
Jesper Eskilson (IAR Systems)
Mario Pierro (IAR Systems)
Greg Watson (IBM)
Al Rossi (NCSA)
Bruce Griffith (Sage)
Dobrin Alexiev (TI)
Patrick Chuong (TI)
Onur Akdemir (Tubitak)
Ugur (Tubitak)
Aaron Spear (VMWare)
Pawel Piech (Windriver)
Doug Schaefer (Windriver)
Dominique Toupin (Ericsson)
Marc Khouzam (Ericsson)

Proposed topics

CoherentLogix demo
Current status and what is coming (from GDB) soon
What can be re-used/shared in PTP?
Visualization/Visualizer feature
Launching/Attaching
What do we need from Debug Platform?
Dealing with complexity in Eclipse
What does the user really want? Features, usability, quality, ...?
Changing connection paradigm e.g., using RSE (Target Management in general) from CDT
Automatic discovery
Scalability
Debugging virtual cores

Some of what was discussed

CoherentLogix demo

The HyperX IDE is CDT with DSF-GDB slightly modified. Does not use GDB but has a simulator that talks GDB/MI.
Grid representation. Hard-coded similarly to Tilera. This would be a different Presentation for the Visualizer view.
When launching, the view gets populated with the hard-code layout, but reads the position of tasks and routes from a backend. Task state is show by color (green, yellow, red).
The Grid view can show multiple chips. This means there are multiple grid views within the main grid view.
Colors from the Grid view are also used in the DV.
Editor show with a green dots on the lines where breakpoints can be set. Setting breakpoint is not done for all cores, instead, they require a launch first and then the user selects the core and then the green dots show only for the code that runs on the chosen task. Existing bp show in the editor only when the right context is selected.
They re-use the outline view to show different information based on some other select view.
Uses the Properties view to show information about debug elements
They also use ZEST from some graph representation.

Visualization

A lot of interest in the Visualizer view feature.
CoherentLogix showed another Presentation

Scope of debugger

What should the CDT debugger address? We talked about how tracing needs to be used to isolate a problem when dealing with a large complex application. Once the problem is isolated, we then want to use traditional debugging. This debugging should allow to focus on multiple threads and cores.

Open-MP

New directives that allow you to parallelize the code e.g., unrolling loops. How do we debug such a situation? For example, when setting a breakpoint, what does it mean.

Relative debugging

Scaling

Integrating Target-Management with Debugging

Kernel vs Application debugging

Bare-metal, Jtag, Kernel and application debugging have different requirements.

Synchronization of two debug context providers

Target explorer view

Provided by TCF and provides a nicer UI than the RSE 'remote systems' view.
It has an editor showing all the processes on the target. The plan is to have a context-menu to attach the debugger. Because it already uses TCF services to the target, it is easy to use the TCF debugger service.
Suggested feature was to drag-and-drop a process into the debug view to start debugging.

UI scripting

TI has javascript using Rhino that allows you to use a command-line to control the UI. Open/close views and such things.
It also allows to write scripts that can do complex things like create a new launch, fill the data, and launch the debugger.
This can also be used as UI test automation.

Graphical representation of data structures

Is there interest in showing data/data structures in a graphical fashion? Some companies already do this.
The view detail pane can be used to show such things.

March 8th, 2011

Attendees

Mikhail Khodjaiants (Mentor)
Abeer Bagul(Tensilica)
Shaiju Nair (Tensilica)
Dobrin Alexiev (TI)
Patrick Chuong (TI)
Pawel Piech (Windriver
Doug Schaefer (Windriver)
Marc Khouzam (Ericsson)

Minutes

API freeze

Does not affect provisional/internal/experimental APIs

Global action set for "C/C++ Advanced Debugging"?

Ultimately all new UI should be under its own actionSet
ActionsSets should then be enabled/disabled automatically, when we figure out if they are of interest to the user
Sometimes it is not possible to know that an actionSet should be enabled.
We could create a perspective for 'multicore', although this may add confusion
Need to allow to turn off pin&clone button visibility
- Currently capabilities can be used for products but are not so good for CDT itself
Bug 246243 shows how to toggle buttons in view using the Command framework
For Indigo, we'll have a global action set for the new 'multicore' features. It will need to be enabled manually. It should include Pin&Clone, Grouping and Multi-process (if necessary).

EclipseCon multicore debug workshop

1:20pm on Wednesday. Marc to email the list

Visualizer view

Need an automated build

Grouping

Feature does not affect existing functionality and can be kept off unless conciously enabled
Patch waiting review
Patch includes UI to group for DSF-GDB or DSF debuggers that implement the new service

Multi-process

Multiple consoles (one per process) is supported
Terminating individual processes is supported
Will commit patch to stop showing the inferior in the debug view. This is the approach taken by EDC and TI's commercial product. We can revert if we don't like it.
Need a way to allow the user to create a new process. Will add a button or entry in the Attach dialog; this is rudimentary as it does not allow for cutomization, but it will allow some users to try it out and exercise the code.
Single process attach on windows no longer show list of processes for GDB < 7.0

Synchronized operations

no progress, working on migration to DSF

Using multiple GDBs in a single launch

Different options are possible
- Multiple DSF sessions. Probably need changes in the VM nodes
- Multiple commandControl service. Changes will be in the services
- Showing multiple models under the same launch

February 22, 2011

Attendees

Norman Yee (Analog Devices)
John Cortell (Freescale)
Mikhail Khodjaiants (Mentor)
Ken Ryall (Nokia)
Bruce Griffith (Sage)
Salvatore (ST Microelectronics)
Abeer (Tensilica)
Shaiju Nair (Tensilica)
Dobrin Alexiev (TI)
Patrick Chuong (TI)
Bill Swanson (Tilera)
Pawel Piech (Windriver
Doug Schaefer (Windriver)
Marc Khouzam (Ericsson)

Minutes

Pin&Clone feature completed

Now fully available in HEAD (including icon overlay)
Available for Variables, Expressions, Registers, Memory Browser and Disassembly
To add Pin&Clone to other views (e.g., not in open-source)
- Add the two buttons to the view using extension point
- When calling addDebugContextListener once must use the interface that uses the secondary id

Visualizer view

Looking for a way to Headlessly build CDT
LinuxTools seem to have a package to build called "eclipse-build"
org.eclipse.cdt.releng/build.sh is used to build all of CDT, along with the PDE build
Marc was not able to work on this due to other features that are planned for Indigo

Grouping

Dobrin working on model to create groups
The plan is to be able to group anything
There will be an API to control what is allowed to be grouped for different debuggers
Dobrin will post a new patch soon

Synchronized operations

Shaiju currently working on migrating Tensilica debugger to DSF
Bug 336788 available for comments

Multi-process

Attaching to multiple processes in the same session is pertty much working with HEAD (GDB 7.2)
Issue with context hierarchy for breakpoints where the breakpoint target does not contain the pid of the process when starting to track the breakpoints, but does contain the pid when we want to stop tracking bps, which makes the equality check fail. See Bug 336890
What do we do about the inferior process?
- We need the inferior process for the IO console and to monitor the life of the process
- We don't necessarily need to show this process in the Debug View. Both EDC and TI have removed that entry.
- Another option is to create a group of inferiors in the DV if there is more than one inferior
- If we remove inferior, we can still show the proper console when selecting a process (container) instead of when selecting the inferior
- TI has a technique to remember if the user last used the IO or debugger console and show it accordingly
- Do we want to support Terminating a single process from Eclipse? If so, we also need to do it when selecting a container
- We could even remove the 'gdb' entry (not as useful since there is only one)
- Marc will prototype something to remove the inferior and see how it feels
Console
- Have one console per process for IO
- Maybe have a global console for output (seems hard for input), but we may need to prefix each line of output, if that is possible
- Don't have a console for attach processes since their IO is not from eclipse
Inferior that runs to completion, how to show in DV?
- When inferior dies we just stop showing it, like we do for threads that complete

Multicore debug workshop at EclipseCon

Marc to email attendees off-line and suggest timeslots

Enhanced Breakpoint Support

Patrick gave a very nice demo of TI's advanced breakpoint support, below are some of the things shown
- breakpoint per target
- unassigned bp can be added to targets after the target is started
- bp properties are provided by the backend
- XML file used to provide set of properties
- ability set all properties before creating the bp
- ability to create a bp is a disabled state
- uses flexible hierarchy and detail pane
- support for target actions
- support for extended host actions (e.g., enable group, show view)
What are others doing? Should talk about it at the next meeting
How do we include (some of) these features into open source? Which company can contribute some of their features?

February 8, 2011

Attendees

Norman Yee (Analog Devices)
Mikhail Khodjaiants (Mentor)
Bruce Griffith (Sage)
Shaiju (Tensilica)
Dobrin Alexiev (TI)
Patrick Chuong (TI)
Bill Swanson (Tilera)
Doug Schaefer (Windriver)
Marc Khouzam (Ericsson)

Minutes

Multicore debug workshop at EclipseCon

We are interested in having a multi-core debug meeting at EclipseCon. Using a BOF is too open and too late at night. We should find a time during the day. We should book a room or maybe use the courtyard. Marc to email foundation for a room.

Visualizer view

First part is to work on the framework and the first presentation
To make it easy to use without CDT, we probably want new plugins

How to build CDT?

Tensilica builds from sources
Tilera looks for a repeatable, automatable way to build CDT
org.eclipse.cdt.releng has scripts to build CDT, uses AntRunner
Need a wiki to explain how to build CDT from sources. Questions should be posted to the list until we figure this out.

Grouping

Dobrin moving code changes from DSF-GDB to DSF
Need people to test: https://bugs.eclipse.org/240208
Dobrin is making TI's debugger work with the proposed changes
next step after that is to define the UI
Need to clarify concepts like:
- backend-supported groups
- frontend-only groups
- recursive grouping
Need to investigate other commands than run-control that can affect groups such a 'load'
Shaiju can try out the patch and provide feedback
Mikhail will also try to get some time
GDB will be doing some work on grouping and we should make sure it fits with what we need

Synchronized operations

Post on the wiki on what Tensilica is doing: What Tensilica is currently providing.
Need to get input from the community to get all requirements
Builds on top of the grouping feature
Tensilica does not use groups, but uses an all-or-nothing grouping approach
Need a bugzilla for this effort, Shaiju opened https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=336788
http://bugs.eclipse.org/330974 for "live" grouping using multi-select

Multi-process UI

UI has to be defined
Marc almost done with plumbing for DSF-GDB using GDB 7.2

Pin&Clone

Part of M2 build
Coloring available in http://bugs.eclipse.org/334566
Patrick almost done with patch for coloring

Enhanced Breakpoint Support

TI has a better bp support using flexible hierarchy
TI deals with breakpoint properties as provided by the backend
TI creating breakpoints allow to set conditions and properties before creating the bp
Demo next meeting of TI bp support
Need to collect requirements
- consolidate things to one location
- creation with full properties before setting bp
- get info from backend

Next conference call will be in two weeks on Februrary the 22nd

January 25, 2011

Attendees

Norman Yee (Analog Devices)
Mikhail Khodjaiants (CodeSourcery)
Aaron Spear (Mentor Graphics)
Ken Ryall (Nokia)
Shaiju (Tensilica)
Dobrin Alexiev (TI)
Patrick Chuong (TI)
Bill Swanson (Tilera)
Pawel Piech (Windriver)
Doug Schaefer (Windriver)
Marc Khouzam (Ericsson)

Minutes

Next conference call will be in two weeks on Februrary the 8th

Synchronized/Grouped Run Control Operations (Synchronous operations)

A synchronous the operation is an operation that makes all elements in a group run in "lock-step" and stop at exactly the same time.
A group leader is needed when doing a true sync operation to know when the operation is finished. For example a group of core 1, 2 and 3 can be requested to step with leader being core 2; the operation will step each core at the same time and will stop all three at exactly the point where core 2 (the leader) will finish its step
Both Mentor and Ericsson use synchronous operations
TI 'simulates' a sync operation in their backend by doing a tight async operation that is actually a full step of each element of the group, but that is done at the same time
GDB has limited support for this kind of operation. The --all flag can be used and the scheduler-locking feature can help.
Tensilica do a loop in the frontend to do individual steps for each group member.
Tilera allows elements of the group to perform the operation only if the leader does not stop right away. The idea is to allow the user to focus on the process that has a problem. This is like all-stop except that when stepping the one process, the others should not move at all, or at least not until the current process progresses enough. "Why resume all the processes if they will be stopped again almost immediately because the main process has hit a breakpoint again".
The eclipse support for this type of operation must be based on backend capabilities because different backend can support this in different ways. This can be achieved by having the DSF services perform the operation in the way their backend supports
Some backend may support may of the synch/asynch/hybrid operations. Do we provide the user with a choice of what type of operation should be used?
There seems to be high interest for such support in Eclipse so we suggest getting this effort started.
Shaiju from Tensilica will try to get time allocated to work on this.

Global breakpoints

Feature coming to GDB where a breakpoint can be set in a binary without specifying which process should be stopped. Any process hitting the breakpoint will be stopped and the debugger will attach to it.
Which set of process does this global breakpoint apply to? All processes, a subset, current and new processes, etc. GDB will have support for such a configuration
For Eclipse, using Global Breakpoint will greatly benefit from the task we identified and called "Enhanced breakpoint support"

Enhanced breakpoint support

WindRiver would like to merge their breakpoint support with CDT. No timeline for it though. Who from WindRiver could be involved?
There is high interest in the community and from different companies. We need to identify someone to lead this effort

Common changes

Pawel agreed that changes that are to be used by multiple DSF debuggers can be put in DSF as long as backward compatibility is respected
If he cannot find time to review such patches, they will need to be handled by other DSF commmitters

Visualizer view

Bill posted a proposal and opened http://bugs.eclipse.org/335027
Mikhail, Dobrin and Marc have already reviewed the document and will post comments to the bug. Others in the community are encouraged to do the same.
Need more use-cases for harware types to be added the document
If needed, we could have a separate conf call to address some question about this proposal
Can we use GEF (Graphical Editing Framework) of Eclipse to help with the different 'Presentations' for this view?
The framework would not use GEF, but the presentations could.
Would PTP benefit of this framework? We should involve them, maybe at EclipseCon11
This framework/view should be in its own plugins

Pin&Clone

Feature available in CDT with an example in DSF-GDB. Can apply easily to DSF and non-DSF debuggers.
Icons for pinning are still waiting to be committed

Grouping

Multi-level hierarchy: Patch is ready but needs more testing
Next step is to implement the grouping/hiding actions

Breadcrumbs

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CDT/Obsolete/MultiCoreDebugWorkingGroup/calls/minutes/2011

Contents

2011 Multicore Debug Workgroup Minutes of Meetings

December 13th, 2011

Attendees

Minutes

November 8th, 2011

Attendees

Minutes

October 25th, 2011

Attendees

Minutes

September 27th, 2011

Attendees

Minutes

August 30th, 2011

Attendees

Minutes

July 26th, 2011

Attendees

Minutes

June 21st, 2011

Attendees

Minutes

May 24th, 2011

Attendees

Minutes

April 26th, 2011

Attendees

Minutes

April 12th, 2011

Attendees

Minutes

March 23rd, 2011 - EclipseCon Workshop

Attendees

Proposed topics

Some of what was discussed

March 8th, 2011

Attendees

Minutes

February 22, 2011

Attendees

Minutes

February 8, 2011

Attendees

Minutes

January 25, 2011

Attendees

Minutes