[Mono-devel-list] "xml-trace" option for mono

[Juraj Skripsky]

Hello Paolo,

I cooked up a patch which adds a loadable trace profiler. It's not quite
finished as I ran into a few problems.

The new trace profiler should offer all the feature of the current one.
The profiler interface needs to be changed/extended to make this
possible:

- The callback functions for method_enter and method_leave need to
receive not only the method signature but also parameters passed to it
as well as the value returned. Today's tracing code uses this:

  void mono_trace_enter_method (MonoMethod *method, char *ebp)
  void mono_trace_leave_method (MonoMethod *method, ...)

I could add "char *ebp" and "..." to the enter and leave function
signature as this information might be interesting for other profilers
too. A new flag in MonoProfileFlags (MONO_PROFILE_ENTER_LEAVE_DATA?)
would control whether "ebp"/"..."  are filled or left "empty". The code
in mono_arch_instrument_{prolog,epilog} would probably have to be
adjusted for the "empty" case.

- There are no profiling hooks yet in the exception code (but there is a
MONO_PROFILE_EXCEPTIONS flag). Today's tracing code prints messages
whenever an exception is thrown, caught or "finallyed" (just grep for
"mono_jit_trace_calls != NULL"...).
I haven't looked at the exception code too closely, so I have no idea
whether it is difficult to add the hooks or not...

- The mono_profiler_startup(const char *desc) function needs an
additional parameter "MonoAssembly *assembly" so we can still have
program-traces (i.e. "mono --trace=program ..."). Knowing the "home"
assembly would be interesting to other profilers too.
A gboolean return value for mono_profiler_startup would also be nice to
be able to signal invalid profiling options in "desc".
(btw: I modified the code of "mono_profiler_load" to strip away the
"modulename:" before passing the options to mono_profiler_startup. This
makes the code shorter and more simple.)


Should I also replace the trace calls in "aot.c" (grep for
"mono_trace_calls != NULL") with profiler hooks?

I also tried to move the default profiler out of "profiler.c" and into a
loadable module (called "simple" for now). It compiles fine but mono
stops with:
  mono: relocation error: /usr/local/lib/libmono-profiler-simple.so:
  undefined symbol: TlsAlloc

This looks like some sort of linking problem. Unfortunately, the world
of autoconf/-make/libtool/... still look pretty mysterious to me. So I'm
completely lost with this problem...


I left the current trace code in for now. The new trace profiler takes
the same arguments and can be started like this:
  mono --profile=trace:T:System.String test.exe

The attached .c files go into the profiler directory.

What do you think?

- Juraj

---
Juraj Skripsky <juraj at hotfeet.ch>
HotFeet - developing the web
Technopark Zurich
Switzerland
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