The first failure in this bunch occurs due to printing an incorrect
result for a variable length array:
print int_vla
$1 = {-1, -1, -1, -1, -1}
The result should actually be this:
$1 = {0, 2, 4, 6, 8}
When I started examining this bug, I found that printing an
individual array element worked correctly. E.g. "print int_vla[2]"
resulted in 4 being printed. I have not looked closely to see why
this is the case.
I found that evaluation of the location expression for int_vla was
causing problems. This is the relevant DWARF entry for int_vla:
I found that DW_OP_breg22 was providing a correct result.
DW_OP_deref_size was fetching the correct value from memory. However,
the value being fetched should be considered a pointer.
DW_OP_deref_size zero extends the fetched value prior to pushing
it onto the evaluation stack. (The DWARF-4 document specifies this
action; so GDB is faithfully implementing the DWARF-4 specification.)
However, zero extending the pointer is not sufficient for converting
that value to an address for rl78 and (perhaps) other architectures
which define a `pointer_to_address' method. (I suspect that m32c
would have the same problem.)
Ideally, we would perform the pointer to address conversion in
DW_OP_deref_size. We don't, however, know the type of the object
that the address refers to in DW_OP_deref_size. I can't think
of a way to infer the type at that point in the code.
Before proceeding, I should note that there are two other DWARF
operations that could be used in place of DW_OP_deref_size. One of
these is DW_OP_GNU_deref_type. Current GDB implements this operation,
but as is obvious from the name, it is non-standard DWARF. The other
operation is DW_OP_xderef_size. Even though it's part of DWARF-2
through DWARF-4 specifications, it's not presently implemented in GDB.
Present day GCC does not output dwarf expressions containing this
operation either. [Of the two, I like DW_OP_GNU_deref_type better.
Using it avoids the need to specify an "address space identifier".
(GCC, GDB, and other non-free tools all need to agree on the meanings
of these identifiers.)]
Back to the bug analysis...
The closest consumer of the DW_OP_deref_size result is the
DWARF_VALUE_MEMORY case in dwarf2_evaluate_loc_desc_full. At that
location, we do know the object type to which the address is intended
to refer. I added code to perform a pointer to address conversion at
this location. (See the patch.)
I do have some misgivings regarding this patch. As noted earlier, it
would really be better to perform the pointer to address conversion in
DW_OP_deref_size. I can't, however, think of a way to make this work.
Changing GCC to output one of the other aforementioned operations might
be preferable but, as noted earlier, these solutions have problems as
well. Long term, I think it'd be good to have something like
DW_OP_GNU_deref_type become part of the standard. If that can't or
won't happen, we'll need to implement DW_OP_xderef_size.
But until that happens, this patch will work for expressions in which
DW_OP_deref_size occurs last. It should even work for dereferences
followed by adding an offset. I don't think it'll work for more than
one dereference in the same expression.
gdb/ChangeLog:
* dwarf2loc.c (dwarf2_evaluate_loc_desc_full): Perform a pointer
to address conversion for DWARF_VALUE_MEMORY.