Improved GDB Stack Traces

Announcement
#1

I was having difficulty reading some of the stack traces in TVM, so I put together a TVM-specific gdb filter to hide stack frames that don’t give significant debugging information, and to give better python-specific information. I’ve been using it for a few weeks now, and wanted to share it as it may be useful to others.

  • Any stack frames that correspond to a python stack frame (PyEval_EvalFrameEx) show the python function name, source file, and line number instead of the C++ stack information.
  • Any other stack frames coming from CPython are hidden.
  • Any stack frames coming from calls through PackedFunc are hidden.

The filter and installation instructions are available on github.

As an example, the left and the right are the same stack trace for the python command tvm.device('vulkan').exist, with a break point at VulkanDeviceAPI::GetAttr, but the right has the cleanup filter applied.

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#2

This looks really neat! Shall we also consider removing some stacktraces in error messages @tkonolige

#3

I’ve been using this for the past few days and it is a really nice quality of life improvement for TVM development, thanks for contributing it!

An additional filter that came to mind could be for the ExprVisitor/Mutator and StmtExprVisitor/Mutator default visitors. Often a user defined pass only contains a few VisitExpr(…) overrides, and in those cases a stack trace will have many entries with default visitation being handled in the base classes. The separation between user defined visitors in those traces can often be large enough to make it difficult to spot them.

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