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About libunwind and dogtail
- From: Wu Zhou <woodzltc at cn dot ibm dot com>
- To: frysk at sources dot redhat dot com
- Cc: cagney at redhat dot com
- Date: Sat, 8 Jul 2006 14:11:12 -0400
- Subject: About libunwind and dogtail
Hello Andrew and all,
We talked about libunwind and dogtail for ppc64 before. I am recently
taking some look into these two. I would like to post my current
understanding here for your review. If there are anything wrong or
missing, please point out and correct me. Thanks a lot!
For dogtail, it is writen in python, based on accessibility
technology. It will use at-spi to communicate with the AT-supporting
GNOME (or other GUI) application. From the point of theory/design,
all of them are platform independent. But from the point of practice,
all these package (GNOME, at-spi, pyspi, dogtail) are receving much
less attention on ppc64 than on x86. So our point is that we need to
test them on ppc64 and try to find how it works on this platform. We
will aslo work with upstream package maintainers to fix exposed
defects. Is my understanding right?
About libunwind, there are some platform dependent feature. My
understanding is that it initiated from ia64 platform and are now
being ported to x86 platform. On ia64, it support local unwind, remote
unwind (I guess this is what interests frysk most, right?), ptrace
stop and resume, get proc/register information... In my opinion,
quite some of these features are platform dependent. Do we need to
port all these functionality to other platforms (x86, ppc64 or
x86-64)? I run a make check on x86 platform, it reported 13 of 24
tests failed. There are some segmentation fault and also some
failure of unw_step. So I guess libunwind is not very mature on x86
yet and not all features are ported to x86 too. My opinion is that we
need only port what is needed by frysk first. So I have a quesiton
here: in what way is libunwind expected to be used in frysk? I guess
it surely includes different process unwind on the same machine. But
will it includes remote process unwind on a different machine/target?
Getting the answer for these is very helpful for us to focus on
high-priority work item.
Regards
- Wu Zhou