Revision as of 13:01, 12 June 2012

Multicore Debug Workgroup Minutes of Meetings

Attendees

1. Norman Yee (Analog Devices)
2. Phil Mason (Broadcom)
3. Mikhail Khodjaiants (Mentor)
4. Abid Hafiz (Mentor)
5. Mark Goodchild (Renesas Electronics)
6. Abeer (Tensilica)
7. Bill Swanson (Tilera)
8. Marc Khouzam (Ericsson)

General

• Juno is a good release for Debug. Most new features for CDT.

Testing for Juno

• Manual Linux testing was done
• We need someone that will take care of Windows testing. Mikhail did try a small session on Windows and it was ok.
• JUnit test for Debug soon to be running on Hudson at Eclipse.org. Starting with GDB 7.4 only.

Enhanced Expressions view

• Enhanced expressions view proposal to allow to filter registers (see bug 381754)
• Prototype available, Marc to focus to this feature next

Breakpoint improvements

• Breakpoints are the weakest part of CDT
• Improving the situation is of interest to Ericsson, Mentor, Tensilica, Renesas.
• Need context-sensitive breakpoints. Mikhail had started this in bug 360735
• Suggestion to have an editable hover in the editor to select which threads/cores a breakpoint applies to
• Suggestion in having breakpoint view show an entry for each target a breakpoint can be applied to
• We could add bp hit count to the bp view if we have a per-target breakpoint entry
• Complexity arises when looking at surrounding scenarios: before launching, multiple debug sessions, etc. We should determine what the user-experience should be during a debugging session, and then somehow deal with all the surrounding scenarios.
• Would be nice to get people to focus on this effort and get some improvements done, as there is a lot of interest

Visualizer

• What should be the next steps for the Visualizer/Multicore Visualizer?
• What to choose for generic Visualizer and what for Multicore Visualizer
  • Should try to make things generic when possible, without spending too much extra time on it
• Showing extra hardware. What kind of hardware should we support? Need concrete examples

OS Awareness

• OS Awareness bug 360314
• GDB support available in HEAD, with one more tweak expected.
• Review comments posted on Gerrit. Vladimir updating contribution to match comments.
• Updated contribution is expected to make use of DSF services instead of sending commands from the view code to GDB

May 8th, 2012

Attendees

1. Phil Mason (Broadcom)
2. Mikhail Khodjaiants (Mentor)
3. Jason Litton (Sage)
4. Bill Swanson (Tilera)
5. Marc Khouzam (Ericsson)

General

• Feature freeze has come and gone.
• Deadline for bug fixes for Juno is June 15th.
• We have a good list of new features that apply to multicore in Juno:
  • Multicore Visualizer View
  • Edit Breakpoint on Create
  • Timeout support for GDB commands
  • Multi-select Resume/Suspend operations
  • Show only suspended threads in Debug view
• Work continues for Kepler

Testing for Juno

• It would be good for people to tests Juno. Focus from this group would be the new Debug features added to Juno
• Bill will look at testing the Multicore Visualizer by end of May
• Sage uses CDT on Windows. Jason will run some tests for the Juno release on Windows.
• Jason will try to to get the Debug JUnit tests to work on Windows again.
• Mikhail has access to a Windows machine but needs to get it properly setup.
• Marc will do testing on Linux and will focus on the new features of Debug

Proposed features

• Marc posted a list of ideas for multicore-debugging on the wiki here
• Mentor discussing making improvement to breakpoints, which could be in-line with proposal above

OS Awareness

• New patch posted by Vladimir. Too late for Juno but Marc will try to get it in early for Kepler. Still dependent on GDB functionality that is not in open-source yet, so we'll need that resolved.
• OS Awareness bug 360314

April 10th, 2012

Attendees

1. Phil Mason (Broadcom)
2. Mikhail Khodjaiants (Mentor)
3. Jason Litton (Sage)
4. Bill Swanson (Tilera)
5. Marc Khouzam (Ericsson)

Minutes

Things for Juno

• Marc was planning on working on Multiple selection https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=330974
  • Mikhail mentioned that the Selection policy may be a problem
  • Platform may require changes for selection policy
  • Already some selection policy problems are being seen
  • A good selection policy is important for usability, so it is important for the multi-selection feature

• Debug testing for 4.2 ongoing.
  • Things look good for Tracepoints and Pin&Clon (which were broken with earlier builds of 4.2)
  • Reverse debugging buttons don't work properly with 4.2. Marc will report problems

• Jason will not be able to work on multicore at this time because Sage needs all-stop for multicore debug, but CDT is more focused on non-stop.o
  • Trying to get all-stop to work nicely with multicore may be something Sage can look at

Things post-Juno (Kepler)

• Marc's current plans is to focus on adding features to the multicore visualizer

Architecture-specific visualization

• It was suggested that visualizations that are specific to different architectures (e.g., Tilera) could still be added to CDT.
  • We can imagine having visualizations for many different architectures (Tilera, TI, Intel, etc)
  • This would allow users that have multiple different architectures without need to change their tool for each one
  • Visualization is not the only factor however; connection with the backend (e.g., using GDB) may not be the same as what is in CDT.

March 13th, 2012

Attendees

1. Norman Yee (Analog Devices)
2. Phil Mason (Broadcom)
3. Mikhail Khodjaiants (Mentor)
4. Bill Swanson (Tilera)
5. Marc Khouzam (Ericsson)

Minutes

Visualizer view

• Visualizer examples plugin was added to CDT with two examples
  • Problems Visualizer
  • SourceGraph Visualizer
• The examples show different ways on how to extend the Visualizer framework.

Enhanced breakpoints

• We see that Pawel is making good progress

Expressions view additions

• Pawel posted some comments/suggestions to the bug

Grouping

• Interest from Mentor, but nothing planned for the moment

February 14th, 2012

Attendees

1. Phil Mason (Broadcom)
2. Eugene Ostroukhov (Nvidia)
3. Bruce Griffith (Sage)
4. Abeer Bagul (Tensilica)
5. Bill Swanson (Tilera)
6. Randy Rohrbach (Windriver)
7. Marc Khouzam (Ericsson)

Minutes

General

• Why not much focus on multi-vendor debug solution so that plugins from one vendor be used into another CDT installation?
  • Probably not an interesting business case for vendors
  • For others, they need to change the platform, so they can't work on someone else's IDE
• Marc will make time to review some contributions that are pending. Anyone else?

Visualizer view progress

• Bug 335027
• Feature has been contributed!
• Bill nominated as committer.
• New&Noteworthy http://wiki.eclipse.org/CDT/User/NewIn90#Multicore_Visualizer_View
• Multi-select feature would be very useful

Enhanced breakpoints

• Pawel and Randy are working on this. Progress going well both in Platform and CDT
• Ability to create a breakpoint and specify its attributes at creation time
• Allowing to add more complex preferences to breakpoints
• Must verify how Tracepoints will be impacted

Expressions view additions

• Contribution bug will be posted soon

Grouping

• No update

January 17th, 2012

Attendees

1. Norman Yee (Analog Devices)
2. Phil Mason (Broadcom)
3. Eugene Ostroukhov (Nvidia)
4. Pete Macliesh (Tensilica)
5. Abeer Bagul (Tensilica)
6. Bill Swanson (Tilera)
7. Doug Schaefer (Windriver)
8. Marc Khouzam (Ericsson)

Minutes

Visualizer view progress

• Bug 335027
• More feature have been added: selection, synchronization with Debug View, toolbar, context menu
• Marc finishing some proposed refactoring before contribution is started
• CQ should be opened this week to contribute. Will go into master branch as an optional feature.
• Demo was given. Very cool!
• Wasted space in visualizer view. Can CPUs 'hug' Cores to avoid that waste? Cores should stay square.
• Need multi-selection run-control for visualizer Bug 330974. Marc will contact Dobrin to see if any progress was made.
• This could apply to target management to show what is running on the target. Would this be a second visualizer view for TM or a different visualizer in the same view? This brings up the nice applicability of Pin&Clone.
• Pin and clone would apply well to visualizer
• How do we show process info in visualizer?
  • Process on cores don't really matter, what matters is what threads belong to the same process
  • brightness can be used to show all threads in the same process as the one selected

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
  • Nice demo showing how working groups and pin&clone can be used to show a subset of expressions and pin them to a core
  • Working groups have been added to DSF and allow to filter the expressions view
  • Wizard was also added to create working groups and to easily pin them.
• Abeer will open a bugzilla to contribute this feature to CDT.

Older minutes of meeting

2011 Minutes of meetings
2010 Minutes of meetings