476785 - Finessing AVMPLUS_VERBOSE mode

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Tamarin Graveyard :: Virtual Machine, enhancement)

Description

[Lars T Hansen]

The verbose mode is a little messy and could probably be cleaned up.

1) It is enabled in release-debugger builds, because it is a handy debugging tool.  This has some unpleasant side effects, notably there is substantial code size increase in the interpreter because each case starts with "if (pool->verbose) showState(<8 arguments>)".  We can avoid that for the switch interpreter but not for threaded code.  For the JIT and the word code translator we could instead emit code that explicitly implements verbose mode, if -Dverbose was given on the command line; for the abc interpreter the code need not be duplicated and can be placed right before the switch, at a modest cost in performance.

2) It is not in debug builds but not in release builds, so release-only problems have to contend with extra variables.  For example, verbose mode retains information about function and class names that are lost in release mode.  It seems likely that this information should be kept around even in release builds (or dropped from normal verbose mode builds, if the memory costs are too great).

3) If we get around to doing better debugging tools (gdb integration, say) then maybe verbose mode should be disabled by default in all configurations.

4) Some have suggested decoupling instruction tracing in the interpreter from other functionality, esp the JIT dumps

Comment 1

[Rick Reitmaier]

Attachment: verbose= flag supper

This patch addresses item 4 and actually fixes the broken verbose output that current exists in debug builds.

Comment 2

[Rick Reitmaier]

Attachment: support for builtins

Applies on top of the previous patch and adds support for -Dverbose=builtins,... which provides behaviour similar to the old -Dverbose_init flag.

BTW, verbose_init has been broken for some time.  The patch removes any remnants of it.

Comment 3

[Steven Johnson]

Comment on attachment 405811 [details] [diff] [review]
verbose= flag supper

Nice.

Comment 4

[Rick Reitmaier]

The pushed patch is slightly different from those posted above, in that it includes -Dverbose=memstats,sweep,occupancy

and 'jitfull' was changed to 'jit'.

see http://hg.mozilla.org/tamarin-redux/rev/d6bc664a2efb

Comment 5

[Steven Johnson]

Attachment: Move default bits to a constant

Move the default-verbose-bits to a constant so other embedders can use it

Comment 6

[Rick Reitmaier]

Comment on attachment 405956 [details] [diff] [review]
Move default bits to a constant

both options are ugly, but at least this one won't get stale.

Comment 7

[Steven Johnson]

(In reply to comment #6)
> (From update of attachment 405956 [details] [diff] [review])
> both options are ugly, but at least this one won't get stale.

ugly is as ugly does. pushed as changeset:   2768:6291692d9825