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Re: [RFC] Using values to handle unwinding
On Fri, Oct 19, 2007 at 02:10:07PM +0200, Ulrich Weigand wrote:
> I think this is an excellent idea. I'm wondering how this plays with
> special conversions needed for certain registers, see e.g. the
> discussion we had last December that led to introduction of the
> value_from_register gdbarch callback.
>
> For example, while we do have ways of performing special conversions
> on the registers themselves, there is no straightforward way to do so
> for unwound register contents. Maybe if we're going to using values
> to represent those, we could allow the architecture to perform type-
> specific conversions on those (this should e.g. allow me to eliminate
> a specical pseudo on the SPU that I'm using to hold the properly
> converted unwound stack pointer register contents).
I see we ended up with both "gdbarch_value_from_register" and
"gdbarch_register_to_value". That's unfortunately confusing :-(
The patch I posted should make things neither better nor worse,
because reading a variable from a register (hardware or saved in a
frame) will still call value_from_register. We'll get the raw bytes
by using the value method but call gdbarch_value_from_register and
get_frame_register_bytes for the final value. So everything works
the same as before.
Perhaps we can adjust value_from_register to convert one struct value
* representing a register's contents to another representing its value
in a particular type? It's a machine-dependent variant of a cast.
> B.t.w. there's another change in the patch: the elimination of the
> prev_pc unwinder method. Could you explain the reason why this is
> now no longer necessary?
Sorry, I should have separated that out. There is only one definition
of prev_pc anywhere. Here it is:
static CORE_ADDR
sentinel_frame_prev_pc (struct frame_info *next_frame,
void **this_prologue_cache)
{
struct gdbarch *gdbarch = get_frame_arch (next_frame);
return gdbarch_unwind_pc (gdbarch, next_frame);
}
And here's the call, with comments removed for brevity:
if (this_frame->unwind->prev_pc != NULL)
/* A per-frame unwinder, prefer it. */
pc = this_frame->unwind->prev_pc (this_frame->next,
&this_frame->prologue_cache);
else if (gdbarch_unwind_pc_p (get_frame_arch (this_frame)))
pc = gdbarch_unwind_pc (get_frame_arch (this_frame), this_frame);
So, as you can see, there's no longer any need for the hook in current
targets.
--
Daniel Jacobowitz
CodeSourcery