Debugging of (C)Python applications
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This document discusses debugging CPython processes with gdb. It begins by stating the goals of making gdb a useful option for debugging and highlighting common issues. It then discusses why debugging is important for large open source projects like OpenStack. Several typical problems that gdb can help with are described, such as hung processes, stepping into native code, and interpreter crashes. Advantages of gdb over pdb are outlined. Prerequisites for using gdb to debug Python are covered, including ensuring gdb has Python support and obtaining CPython debugging symbols. Various gdb commands for debugging Python processes are demonstrated, such as attaching to a process, printing tracebacks and locals, and executing Python code in the debugged process. Finally, some common gotchas are highlighted around virtual environments
![Gotchas: python‑dbg
a separate build of CPython (with ‐‐with‐pydebug passed to
./configure ) with many run‑time checks enabled, thus, much
slower
not required for using gdb
$ time python ‐c "print(sum(range(1, 1000000)))"
499999500000
real 0m0.096s
user 0m0.057s
sys 0m0.030s
$ time python‐dbg ‐c "print(sum(range(1, 1000000)))"
499999500000
[18318 refs]
real 0m0.237s
user 0m0.197s
sys 0m0.016s](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/slides-170128095329/85/Debugging-of-C-Python-applications-33-320.jpg)
Debugging of (C)Python applications
- 1. Debugging of CPython processes with gdb KharkivPy January 28th, 2017 by Roman Podoliaka, Development Manager at Mirantis twitter: @rpodoliaka blog: http://podoliaka.org slides: http://podoliaka.org/talks/
- 2. Goals of this talk make gdb "a known unknown", so that you consider it as an option in the future highlight the common gotchas
- 3. Why debugging? working on a huge open source cloud platform ‑ OpenStack dozens of various (micro‑)services ‑ from REST APIs to system daemons new features are important, but high availability and overall stability are even more important continuous functional / performance / scale testing numerous customer deployments things break... pretty much all the time!
- 4. Caveats The described debugging techniques assume that you use: Linux Darwin (macOS): must be similar, but lldb is the debugger of choice there Windows: should work, if you use a recent gdb build with Python support enabled and have debugging symbols for CPython CPython 2.7 or 3.x debugging scripts are interpreter‑specific, so no PyPy/Jython/IronPython/etc 2.6 works too, but up‑to‑date scripts are more useful
- 5. What's wrong with pdb? It's a nice and easy to use debugger, that should be your default choice, but it: can't attach to a running process can't step into native code (e.g. shared libraries, C/C++ extensions or CPython itself) can't be used for debugging of interpreter crashes (i.e. core dumps)
- 6. Typical problems: hung process a process is stuck in S (sleeping) state and does not respond strace 'ing shows that it is trying to acquire a lock (i.e. futex(...) ) one needs a way to map this to the exact line in the application code especially important if you use cooperative concurrency (i.e. asyncio, eventlet, gevent, etc)
- 7. Typical problems: going into native code ~14000 unit tests, one or a few create a temporary directory in the git working tree and do not clean up after themselves. How do you identify those? pdb does not allow to set breakpoints in built‑in functions (like os.makedirs() )
- 8. Typical problems: interpreter crashes rarely happen in common applications but still do with things like mod_wsgi (https://github.com/GrahamDumpleton/mod_wsgi/issues/81) or calls to native libraries via cffi (https://bitbucket.org/cffi/cffi/issues/240/cffi‑crash‑on‑debian‑ unstable‑with‑gcc‑5)
- 9. gdb a general purpose debugger, that is mostly used for debugging of C and C++ applications (supports Objective‑C, Pascal, Rust, Go and more) allows attaching to a running process without instrumenting it in advance allows taking a core dump (a state of process memory at a specific moment of time) in order to analyze it later allows post‑mortem debugging of core dumps of crashed processes saved by the kernel (if ulimit allows for it) allows switching between threads
- 10. ptrace: the secret power behind gdb and strace #include <sys/ptrace.h> long ptrace(enum __ptrace_request request, pid_t pid, void *addr, void *data); provides a means by which one process (the "tracer") may observe and control the execution of another process (the "tracee")
- 11. Debugging of interpreted languages Python code is not compiled into a native binary for a target platform. Instead there is an interpreter (e.g. CPython, the reference implementation of Python), which executes compiled byte‑code when you attach to a Python process with gdb, you'll debug the interpreter instance and introspect the process state at the interpreter level, not the application level
- 12. Debugging of interpreted languages: interpreter level traceback #0 0x00007fcce9b2faf3 in __epoll_wait_nocancel () at ../sysdeps #1 0x0000000000435ef8 in pyepoll_poll (self=0x7fccdf54f240, args=<op #2 0x000000000049968d in call_function (oparg=<optimized out>, pp_st #3 PyEval_EvalFrameEx () at ../Python/ceval.c:2666 #4 0x0000000000499ef2 in fast_function () at ../Python/ceval.c #5 call_function () at ../Python/ceval.c:4041 #6 PyEval_EvalFrameEx () at ../Python/ceval.c:2666
- 13. Debugging of interpreted languages: application level traceback /usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist‐packages/eventlet/greenpool.py:82 `func(*args, **kwargs)` /opt/stack/neutron/neutron/agent/l3/agent.py:461 in _process_router_u `for rp, update in self._queue.each_update_to_next_router():` /opt/stack/neutron/neutron/agent/l3/router_processing_queue.py: `next_update = self._queue.get()` /usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist‐packages/eventlet/queue.py:313 in `return waiter.wait()` /usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist‐packages/eventlet/queue.py:141 in `return get_hub().switch()` /usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist‐packages/eventlet/hubs/hub.py:294 `return self.greenlet.switch()`
- 15. gdb and Python gdb can be built with Python support enabled that essentially means one can extend gdb with Python scripts e.g. pretty‑printing for C++ STL containers: https://sourceware.org/gdb/wiki/STLSupport the very same mechanism is used for debugging of CPython: https://github.com/python/cpython/blob/master/Tools/gdb/libpy thon.py
- 16. Prerequisites: gdb with Python support apt‐get install gdb or yum install gdb or something else depending on the distro you use, then gdb ‐ex 'python print("ok")' ‐ex quit | tail ‐n 1
- 17. Prerequisites: CPython debugging symbols debugging symbols are information on the data type of each variable or function and the correspondence between source line numbers and addresses in the executable code generated when applications are compiled with ‑g flag passed to gcc/clang consume a lot of disk space, thus, are usually stripped from compiled binaries and shipped separately the most popular and commonly used format of debugging symbols is called DWARF
- 18. Prerequisites: CPython debugging symbols apt‐get install python‐dbg or yum install python‐debuginfo CentOS/RHEL put those into a separate repo debuginfo‐install python Some distros (like Arch Linux) do not ship debugging symbols at all
- 19. Prerequisites: CPython scripts for gdb developed in CPython code tree: https://github.com/python/cpython/blob/master/Tools/gdb/libpy thon.py packaged and shipped by Linux distros loaded by gdb automatically when debugging python binary can also be loaded manually like (gdb) source ~/src/cpython/Tools/gdb/libpython.py
- 20. Debug a process from the start gdb /usr/bin/python (gdb) run my_python_script.py
- 21. Attach to a running process gdb /usr/bin/python ‐p $PID or simply gdb ‐p $PID (note: gdb will stop all process threads)
- 22. Load the inferior state from a core dump get a core dump of a running process gcore $PID open it in gdb gdb /usr/bin/python core.$PID
- 26. Set a breakpoint in native code gdb /usr/bin/python (gdb) break mkdir Breakpoint 1 at 0x417600 (gdb) condition 1 $_regex((char*) $rdi, ".*/instances/.*") (gdb) commands 1 Type commands for breakpoint(s) 1, one per line. End with a line saying just "end". >py‐bt >end end (gdb) run ‐m testtools.run discover ‐s nova/tests/unit
- 27. Execute arbitrary Python code in the process context (gdb) call PyGILState_Ensure() $21 = PyGILState_UNLOCKED (gdb) call PyRun_SimpleString("print('hello')") hello $22 = 0 (gdb) call PyGILState_Release(PyGILState_UNLOCKED)
- 28. Gotchas: virtual environments and custom CPython builds when attaching to a Python process started in a virtual environment debugging symbols may suddenly not be found anymore gdb ‐p $2975 Attaching to process 2975 Reading symbols from .../venv/bin/python2... (no debugging symbols found)...done. it happens because gdb looks for them in the wrong place: if you omit the inferior binary path, gdb tries to derive it from /proc/$PID/exe symlink and then load debugging symbols stored in the predefined path ‑ e.g. /usr/lib/debug/$PATH . For a virtual environment it's not /usr/lib/debug/usr/bin/python2 , thus, loading fails
- 29. Gotchas: virtual environments and custom CPython builds the solution is to always pass the inferior binary path explicitly when attaching to a process gdb /usr/bin/python2.7 ‐p $PID alternatively, modern CPython builds (at least on Debian Testing or Ubuntu Xenial) have an associated build‐id value, that is used to uniquely identify stripped debugging symbols objdump ‐s ‐j .note.gnu.build‐id /usr/bin/python2.7 Reading symbols from /usr/lib/debug/.build‐id/8d/04a3ae38521cb7c7928e
- 30. Gotchas: virtual environments and custom CPython builds py‑ commands may be undefined for a very similar reason (gdb) py‐bt Undefined command: "py‐bt". Try "help". gdb autoloads debugging scripts from $PATH‐gdb.py (gdb) info auto‐load gdb‐scripts: No auto‐load scripts. libthread‐db: No auto‐loaded libthread‐db. local‐gdbinit: Local .gdbinit file was not found. python‐scripts: Loaded Script Yes /usr/share/gdb/auto‐load/usr/bin/python2.7‐gdb.py
- 31. Gotchas: virtual environments and custom CPython builds you can always load the scripts manually it's also useful for testing of the new versions of gdb scripts shipped with CPython (gdb) source /usr/share/gdb/auto‐load/usr/bin/python2.7‐gdb.py
- 32. Gotchas: PTRACE_ATTACH not permitted Controlled by /proc/sys/kernel/yama/ptrace_scope , possible values are 0 ‑ a process can PTRACE_ATTACH to any other process running under the same uid 1 ‑ only descendants can be traced (default on Ubuntu) 2 ‑ admin‑only attach, or through children calling PTRACE_TRACEME 3 ‑ no processes may use ptrace with PTRACE_ATTACH nor via PTRACE_TRACEME
- 33. Gotchas: python‑dbg a separate build of CPython (with ‐‐with‐pydebug passed to ./configure ) with many run‑time checks enabled, thus, much slower not required for using gdb $ time python ‐c "print(sum(range(1, 1000000)))" 499999500000 real 0m0.096s user 0m0.057s sys 0m0.030s $ time python‐dbg ‐c "print(sum(range(1, 1000000)))" 499999500000 [18318 refs] real 0m0.237s user 0m0.197s sys 0m0.016s
- 34. Gotchas: compiler build flags some Linux distros build CPython with ‐g0 or ‐g1 flags passed to gcc: the former produces a binary without debugging information at all, and the latter does not allow gdb to get information about local variables at runtime the solution is to rebuild CPython with ‐g or ‐g2 ( 2 is the default value when ‐g is passed)
- 35. Gotchas: optimized out frames depending on the optimization level used in gcc when building CPython or the exact compiler version used, it's possible that information on local variables or function arguments will be lost at runtime (e.g. with aggressive optimizations enabled by ‐O3 ) (gdb) py‐bt Traceback (most recent call first): File "test2.py", line 9, in g time.sleep(1000) File "test2.py", line 5, in f g() (frame information optimized out)
- 36. Gotchas: optimized out frames it's still possible to debug such builds of CPython, though it may be tricky (gdb) disassemble Dump of assembler code for function PyEval_EvalFrameEx: ... 0x00007ffff7a04e88 <+8>: mov %rdi,%r12 ... (gdb) p ((PyObject*) $r12)‐>ob_type‐>tp_name $97 = 0x7ffff7ab59f0 "frame" (gdb) p (char*) (&((PyUnicodeObject*) ((PyFrameObject*) $r12) ‐>f_code‐>co_name)‐>_base‐>_base + 1) $98 = 0x7ffff6a8aca0 "g"
- 37. Gotchas: PyPy, Jython, etc the described debugging technique is only feasible for the CPython interpreter as is, as the gdb extension is specifically written to introspect the state of CPython internals (e.g. PyEval_EvalFrameEx calls) for PyPy there is an open issue on Bitbucket, where it was proposed to provide integration with gdb, but looks like the attached patches have not been merged yet and the person, who wrote those, lost interest in this for Jython you could probably use standard tools for debugging of JVM applications, e.g. VisualVM
- 38. Links gdb Debugging Full Example: http://brendangregg.com/blog/2016‑08‑09/gdb‑example‑ ncurses.html Low‑level Python debugging with gdb: http://grapsus.net/blog/post/Low‑level‑Python‑debugging‑with‑ GDB a blog post on CPython internals: https://tech.blog.aknin.name/category/my‑projects/pythons‑ innards/ pydevd: http://pydev.blogspot.com/2014/09/attaching‑ debugger‑to‑running‑process.html pyringe: https://github.com/google/pyringe
- 39. Conclusion gdb is a powerful tool, that allows one to debug complex problems with crashing or hanging CPython processes, as well as Python code, that does calls to native libraries on modern Linux distros debugging CPython processes with gdb must be as simple as installing of debugging symbols for the interpreter build, although there are a few known gotchas, especially when virtual environments are used
- 40. Questions? Your feedback is very appreciated! twitter: @rpodoliaka blog: http://podoliaka.org slides: http://podoliaka.org/talks/