Coverage analysis update

Joel Sherrill joel at rtems.org
Thu Jul 6 14:34:27 UTC 2017


On Thu, Jul 6, 2017 at 5:53 AM, Cillian O'Donnell <cpodonnell8 at gmail.com>
wrote:

> On 6 July 2017 at 08:05, Chris Johns <chrisj at rtems.org> wrote:
> > On 05/07/2017 22:46, Cillian O'Donnell wrote:
> >>
> >> Now the thing is, I might have to run RTEMS Tester about 3 times for
> >> the full testsuite before I can get the report, as the covoar runs
> >> will often hang on an arbitrary method and have to be manually exited
> >> and re-run.
> >
> > How is covoar being run? Is it being run by the 'rtems-test' command?
>
> Yes covoar runs after the testsuite if a --coverage flag is included
> with rtems-test command.
> >
> >> The point that this happens is not repeatable and there's
> >> no error message to go on.
> >
> > Is it the covoar process that is stopping? Is it the process idle or
> using 100%?
>
> Covoar locks up and becomes idle. Joel mentioned in the IRC meeting
> he's seen it before and I'll need to track down the exe causing it and
> debug it to get rid of this
>

There must be a misunderstanding. I have never seen covoar lock up
like this.

It will ignore records when it thinks things are inconsistent. This can
occur
when a method appears in two different executables and has different
sizes. The cause of this is usually padding at the end of the method so
the subsequent method in memory starts on a nice cache-line alignment.
The code tries to recognize the nops/padding at the end and ignore them.
When the padding inserted by ld changes or the objdump output being
parsed changes, covoar needs to be adjusted.

The ignored record message I saw is in the code that reads Couverture
trace records. The info in the record appears to be inconsistent with the
code to which it has been matched. This could be because the trace
record format has been changed or a simple bug.

>From what I have seen, it is likely that it is primarily bugs in input
processing.

But the code to do the "big union" of the trace data has to iterate over
all tests and all coverage blocks. It can take a while to run. I guess
there could be an infinite loop in it.  I always debugged it by having
a test case I could run in gdb.


> >
> >> The only common theme is the methods will
> >> often be called thread...something. Even more rarely it will stop with
> >> the message 'resource temporarily unavailable'. I'm wondering is this
> >> normal behaviour for covoar on a long test-run? This never happens
> >> when running just the samples.
> >
> > It is not normal behavior.
>

+1

Is Linux or covoar printing the message? It holds all data in memory while
doing the analysis. Is it consuming a lot of RAM?


> >> When a test run is successful it will also finish with a lot of these
> messages:
> >>
> >> *** Trace block is inconsistent with coverage map
> >> *** Trace block (0x4000c4fc - 0x4000c51f) for 36 bytes
> >> *** Coverage map /home/cpod/coverage_test/test/
> coverage/unlimited.exe.cov
> >> INFO: DesiredSymbols::mergeCoverageMap - Unable to merge coverage map
> >> for _Thread_queue_Extract_with_proxy because the sizes are different
> >
> > I wonder what sizes are different?
>
> For this one, Joel mentioned it could be something to do with nops
> being added or space not matching and to take a look at _Thread_
> queue_Extract_with_proxy  in the objdump and see if I can dig up
> anything from that. That message appears for _Thread_
> queue_Extract_with_proxy  on all tests from base_sp.exe to
> unlimited.exe when running the full testsuite and on a few instances
> it also mentions unable to merge coverage map for TOD_TICKS_PER_SECOND
> for the same reason. The mismatch is always 36 bytes.
>

You need to find the two executables it differs on and see why the size
is different. It processes them from first to last on the command line so
find the first one that has the symbol and compare the dump to that
one it is flagging as different.

>
> Also I wanted to mention, there is quite a bit of work from the 2
> previous students on the integration of the coverage work into RTEMS
> Tester, would you be interested in starting the merging process of
> this. It might take a while to get everything reviewed and make any
> necessary changes. At this point it is working. its just fixing bugs,
> which I'm working on at the moment.
>

Chris.. I suggested this. It seems the basic flow and integration of
coverage into the tester is good enough to review and merge.

--joel


>
> Thanks,
>
> Cillian.
> >
> > Chris
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