[lldb][docs] Add section on testing with QEMU user (#149057)

This is not recommended to basically anyone but on occasion it's useful
and could be used for testing with other simulator programs for example
bare metal simulators.

It is not something we do officially support or make any quality
guarantees for.

Adding this is also an excuse to document the limitations and make the
time spent setting up system mode look more worthwhile and might be good
to cite in future discussions about testing in simulation.
This commit is contained in:
David Spickett
2025-07-16 17:47:21 +01:00
committed by GitHub
parent 97922a7d40
commit 9f364fe9c4

View File

@@ -167,3 +167,50 @@ The result of this is that:
Your VM configuration should have ports ``54321`` and ``49140`` forwarded for
this to work.
QEMU user mode emulation
------------------------
Serious testing of LLDB should be done using system mode emulation. The following
is presented for information only and is not a supported testing configuration
supported by the LLDB project.
However, it is possible to run the test suite against user mode QEMU if you just
want to test a specific aspect of ``lldb`` and are ok ignoring a lot of expected
failures. This method can also be adapted for simulators with a qemu-like command
line interface.
(``lldb-server`` cannot be tested using user mode QEMU because that does not
emulate the debugging system calls that ``lldb-server`` tries to make)
Change ``LLDB_TEST_USER_ARGS`` to choose the ``qemu-user`` platform and
configure it for your architecture. The example below is for AArch64 and assumes
that ``qemu-aarch64`` is installed and on your path.
If you need to override how the ``qemu-user`` platform finds the QEMU binary,
look up the rest of the platform's settings in LLDB.
::
-DLLDB_TEST_USER_ARGS="--platform-name;qemu-user;--setting;platform.plugin.qemu-user.architecture=aarch64;--arch;aarch64"
Also set ``LLDB_TEST_COMPILER`` to something that can target the emulated
architecture. Then you should be able to run ``ninja check-lldb`` and it will
run the tests on QEMU user automatically.
You will see a number of failures compared to a normal test run. Reasons for
this can be, but are not limited to:
* QEMU's built-in debug stub acting differently and supporting different
features to different extents, when compared to ``lldb-server``. We try to
be compatible but LLDB is not regularly tested with QEMU user.
* Tests that spawn new processes to attach to. QEMU user only emulates a single
process.
* Watchpoints. Either these are not emulated or behave differently to real
hardware. Add ``--skip-category;watchpoint`` to ``-DLLDB_TEST_USER_ARGS`` to
skip those.
* Lack of memory region information due to QEMU communicating this in the
GDB server format which LLDB does not use.