This is going to sound like quite a yak-shave, but here goes: I was spending some research time here at Igalia working on a new virtual machine for Guile when I got interested by DWARF, the debugging format used in many UNIX systems (GNU, the BSDs, Mac OS). For various reasons, we needed a new debugging format, and DWARF seemed suitable.

I was going to need tools that would both produce and consume DWARF information, so I started with the parser. Of course there is a ready source of DWARF information on a GNU system, in all of the shared libraries. So I wrote a tool to snarf information out of those libraries. It is suprising how much there is!

dltool

Enough of the strange introduction! Let's try it out:

$ dltool print-one libc wmemchr (subprogram (name "wmemchr") (prototyped #t) (type (pointer-type (byte-size 8) (type (named-type-reference (typedef "wchar_t"))))) (formal-parameter (name "s") (type (pointer-type (byte-size 8) (type (const-type (type (named-type-reference (typedef "wchar_t")))))))) (formal-parameter (name "c") (type (named-type-reference (typedef "wchar_t")))) (formal-parameter (name "n") (type (named-type-reference (typedef "size_t")))))

Nifty, no? It even prints the names of the formal parameters. The structure of the printout mirrors the structure of the DWARF information quite closely, so for a detailed reference you should refer to the DWARF standard. Note though that the "type" child of a "subprogram" (procedure, function, etc) denotes its return type. If it's missing, the function does not return a value.

In this case we see that wmemchr returns a pointer to a wchar_t , and we see that the pointer is 8 bytes wide. We don't see the definition of wchar_t though. You can pass a --depth=N to see more information, recursively, but it's most useful to simply have the tool print out a tree of needed declarations, this time with the print-decls command instead of print-one :

$ dltool print-decls libc wmemchr (typedef (name "wchar_t") (type (base-type (byte-size 4) (encoding signed) (name "int")))) (typedef (name "size_t") (type (base-type (byte-size 8) (encoding unsigned) (name "long unsigned int")))) (subprogram (name "wmemchr") ...)

Here the body of the subprogram is the same as before. If I leave off the wmemchr argument, I get all the declarations that are publically exported by libc , and that have debugging information.

locating debug information

In the examples above, I'm just passing the basename of the library. dltool is smart enough to look in the library paths if needed, via parsing /etc/ld.so.conf and $LD_LIBRARY_PATH .

These days it is not so common for a stock GNU distribution to have debugging symbols installed for its libraries. Instead the debugging information is packaged separately, and a .gnu_debuglink section is left in the main binary (library, or executable, or both -- have you ran /lib/ld-linux.so.2 lately?). dltool can deal with that.

The only thing it doesn't handle is compressed debug info ( .zdebug_info sections). Hopefully these sections go away at some point though: they prevent debuggers from mapping the debugging information directly, they don't save any distribution cost (packages being zipped already), and have no other runtime impact, as they debuginfo isn't normally loaded.

c++?!?!

Oddly enough, dltool works with C++ too. In this case, I point it at a debugging version of the JavaScriptCore library, looking for a definition of the JSC::JSCell class.

$ dltool print-one --grovel .libs/libjavascriptcoregtk-3.0.so JSC::JSCell (class-type (specification (named-type-reference (structure-type "JSCell") (namespace "JSC"))) (byte-size 16) (member (name "TypedArrayStorageType") (type (const-type (type (named-type-reference (enumeration-type "TypedArrayType") (namespace "JSC"))))) (declaration #t) (const-value 0)) (member (name "m_classInfo") (type (pointer-type (byte-size 8) (type (const-type (type (named-type-reference (structure-type "ClassInfo") (namespace "JSC"))))))) (data-member-location ((plus-uconst 0))) (accessibility private)) ...)

In this case I used the --grovel option to indicate that I wanted to traverse all the debugging entries to find the one I wanted, instead of looking in the symbol table. That was necessary in this case because type definitions aren't present in a symbol table. The actual result is some 1500 lines long, with member variables and functions, and of course it's not complete as it's just a print-one output.

If the data-member-declaration entry looks a little odd to you, that's because it is odd: it's a sequence of opcodes for a virtual machine that computes locations of values. DWARF specifies a couple of little machines like this. For class members, there's usually only the one plus-uconst opcode, but with bitfields, different opcode sequences are possible.

challenges

Making dltool was quite an interesting hack. Oddly, writing the DWARF parser was the easy part. I had an ELF parser and linker already, and although quite flexible, DWARF is regular and well-specified.

One tricky part was making dltool fast, while not consuming too much memory. There can be a lot of data in a debugging object. For example, the debugging version of libwebkitgtk-3.0.so is bigger than 1GB. In a number of cases, we have to trade off the cost of re-parsing versus the cost of storing parsed data in memory. dltool can indeed handle WebKit, which is something I'm proud of, though printing all the exported declarations takes 2 GB of memory and some three or four minutes. More modest tasks like describing libcairo only take a second or two.

Another tricky part was determining which types are actually the same. In C and C++, typically you compile each file on its own, and then link them together. Each time you compile a file, the compiler loads the headers that the file needs and creates instances of those types, internal to the compiler. The debugging information that the compiler writes can contain as many (or more) definitions of (for example) size_t as there are compilation units that reference it. dltool needs to unify those types that are the same, not only to prevent multiple type declarations, but also to prevent divergence when processing recursive types.

C++'s nested namespaces also presented a problem. DWARF information is organized in trees, though they can also be reference each other by offset. However, there are no up-pointers in the tree nodes. It seems that you need to pre-traverse the node trees to determine the ranges of the namespaces so you can determine the right context for a node at any given offset. C does not have this issue, partly because it is less expressive, and partly due to some DWARF design decisions.

dltool doesn't currently demangle C++ names, for what that's worth.

Oddly, C++ templates were not very much of a problem. They simply create debugging entries with really crazy names, that's all.

"automatic" ffi?

I think dltool is pretty cool. Given an opaque information-ful object, I always want some tool to spread information on a screen in a structured way. So it's an interesting tool for binary spelunkers.

There are some obvious applications, though. One is to use the information that dltool finds to automatically generate bindings from C (or even C++) libraries to your language of choice. You can use a dltool run to generate the bindings at "compile-time", or save it to a file and generate bindings at run-time with node-ffi or ctypes or whatever the kids use these days.

Of course in Guile, besides importing the dlhacks module and creating bindings at runtime, we can get the best situation by running the dltool groveller from within a macro. That way we pull the DWARF groveller into our language, without having the module depend on dlhacks or on the presence of debugging information at runtime.

There are some limitations, though. DWARF is a flexible and extensible format, but it doesn't currently get all of the information you would want in a binding. For example there's no way to tell the C compiler to serialize an association between "struct ClutterActor" and a GType named "ClutterActor". You can't tell it that the return value of wcsdup is actually owned by the caller. You can't annotate pointer arguments to indicate that they are "out" or "in/out" or whatever. But this is not a failing of DWARF: it is a current limitation of our toolchain.

Actually it's also a limitation of C -- I mean, everything you would want to say about a variable or a function or whatever is, loosely speaking, the type of that object. We can't really change C's type system, but we can improve our toolchain by allowing for GCC to recognize and plumb through more relevant __attribute__ annotations.

all right, all ready

Anyway, that's the thing! The tool itself requires Guile 2.0. If you're running Debian, just install guile-2.0, then:

git clone git://gitorious.org/guile-dlhacks/guile-dlhacks.git cd guile-dlhacks autoreconf -vif && ./configure && make ./env dltool help

Visit the gitorious page for more, and find me on #guile for more.

Happy spelunking!