Re: [Qemu-discuss] inspect an instruction inside the translation block

[Ronen Meir]

Hi, and thanks

Started using the singlestep option and I see single instruction per TB indeed.

We are using Qemu in user mode. We have a specific call to a branch that 
evolves few LD and store instructions to be used for our system purposes. 
Those instructions gets specific address space which is apparently outside the 
program stack, (FFFFFFFC, FFFFFF8 and so on). Of course Qemu fails on 
segmentation problem and core dump. 
I've been trying to fetch the specific instructions just before Qemu translates 
the to the machine/host code in order to prevent the segmentation, and to 
implement our hooks. 

Is it possible?


Thanks

Ronen


-----Original Message-----
From: Peter Maydell [mailto:address@hidden 
Sent: Sunday, November 09, 2014 6:41 PM
To: Ronen Meir
Cc: address@hidden
Subject: Re: [Qemu-discuss] inspect an instruction inside the translation block

On 9 November 2014 15:37, Ronen Meir <address@hidden> wrote:
> I'm using Qemu with ARM as target OS.
>
> As far as I understand QEMU executes full  translation blocks (TB).  I 
> would like to isolate and debug a specific instruction within a translation 
> block.

That depends on what you mean by "debug". The simplest way to debug guest code 
inside QEMU is to attach a gdb to qemu's builtin gdbstub (you'll need one which 
understands the ARM architecture; a "multiarch" gdb such as the one shipped in 
ubuntu's gdb-multiarch package will do). That will let you set breakpoints, 
single step, and so on, as an assembly level debugger.

You can also use QEMU's -singlestep option to force us to put exactly one 
instruction in each TB. Whether this is actually any use to you depends rather 
on what you're trying to do; it's probably only really helpful if you're trying 
to debug QEMU itself, in which case you'll probably also want to use our -d 
option to enable various kinds of debug logging (including disassembly of guest 
instructions in and TCG ops and host instructions out).

thanks
-- PMM