CDT/Obsolete/MultiCoreDebugWorkingGroup/calls/minutes

Multi-Core Debugging Work Group Conference Calls

Conference call dates

Next call

November 30, 2010

Previous calls

November 16, 2010

Agenda for next call

• Demo of Tilera's Grid view [Bill]
• Demo of Pin&Clone feature for CDT [Patrick]
• Demo of current progress on recursive containers, grouping, hiding [Dobrin]
• Current status
• Other tasks beyond ongoing work

Minutes of previous calls

November 16, 2010

Attendees

• Patrick Chuong (TI)
• Dobrin Alexiev (TI)
• Pawel Piech (WindRiver)
• Doug Schaefer (WindRiver)
• Pete Macliesh (Tensilica)
• Anand Bhange (Tensilica)
• Norman Yi (Analog Devices)
• Bill Swanson (Tilera)
• John Cortell (Freescale)
• Marc Khouzam (Ericsson)
• Abeer Bagul (Tensilica)

Minutes

• Level of expected contributions from interested parties
  • Patrick and Dobrin have time allocated to this
  • Marc has time allocated for this
  • Pete can have someone help on UI work
  • Other commitments will clarify as the effort takes shape

• Conference calls
  • We will continue with this time slot (11am Ottawa time) every two weeks or so. We will adjust the frequency depending on the progress.

• Current status
  • TI (Patrick and Dobrin) are working on open-sourcing some of their multi-core features
    • Pin & Clone effort (Patrick)
      • He has posted a small patch for platform which would allow other projects (e.g., CDT) to implement Pin and Clone. He is waiting for the platform team to review the patch in detail.
      • Patrick was ready to give a demo but we ran out of time. We will have the demo at the next conference call.
      • After the demo, we can start discussing and potentially bringing to the cdt-dev list the question of having this feature committed to CDT (pending the approval of the small platform patch)
      • Worked tracked in Bug 327263. Anyone can try out the feature as follows:
        1. Checkout the platform org.eclipse.debug and org.eclipse.debug.ui plugins
        2. Apply the latest patch available in Bug 327263
        3. Save the test plugin also attached to Bug 327263, and import it into your workspace.
        4. Start cloning and pinning debug views using the new buttons added to each view!
    • Recursive set of container context in DSF/DSF-GDB (Dobrin)
      • The approach is to use the Debug View with a recursive set of containers, where the backend debugger remains the top-level entity.
      • Worked tracked in Bug 240208
      • Issues with deltas when enabling recursive containers
      • Does anyone have a use-case where a container would also have a stack frame under it? Currently no, so we won't pursue this at this time.
      • Dobrin will demo his progress at the next conference call
      • TI's uses cases all focus on 10 to 50 contexts in the debug view. They currently feel that dealing with more than 100 contexts requires a new approach.

• Discussions on Tilera's Grid view:
  • The view has proven useful, but mostly when knowledge about the underlying hardware was relevant to the problem being debugged.
  • Tilera saw that software designers still view their software as a generic grouping of processes and threads, as shown in the Debug View.
  • Different users approach different problems in different ways. We should give users different views, etc, to tackle problems and let them choose what suits their needs.
  • Concerns were voiced about having two selection providers (Debug View and Grid view), but Bill confirmed he was able to get it to work. A demo will be given at the next call.
  • Someone asked if PTP had to deal with multiple selection providers for their views. We did not know the answer to this.

• Filtering of information is essential to multi-core debugging. Grouping and hiding are trying to address this.

• Clean up wiki page to help people add their use-cases of interest, to help keep focus on the problems we face. [Marc]

• Code Reviews would be valuable. With people actively working on this effort, we could code review each others work.

• We will need to allocate time to do proper documentation for the features we will implement in this effort.