Add a CLI version of ESPExceptionDecoder

[earlephilhower]

Seems like Platform.IO doesn't have JAVA plugins, so running the stack dump decoder is not an option for them.

It would be nice to have a CLI version of the exception decoder that would take the ELF file and stack dump as input and produce the same output as the java plugin.

[liebman]

This CLI decoder has worked for me in the past https://github.com/littleyoda/EspStackTraceDecoder

[earlephilhower]

Thanks @liebman. It needs a little updating (it still uses addr2line which has issues with reporting on the Xtensa architecture and is missing the last failed allocation parsing) but OTW looks like something I can add to the toolchain build and be part of the installed binaries easily enough!

[liebman]

I was just looking at it as well and came across this one (I've not used it): https://github.com/luffykesh/EspExceptionDecoder-CLI

[liebman]

I was also thinking it should not be too hard to implement in python which may be easier for PlatformIO and other non-java based tool sets.

[earlephilhower]

Jackpot on #6310 (comment). It's a fork of the GUI with the GUI bits stripped off. It has my updates to use GDB and parse the OOM error already, so that's a plug-and-play one.

A Python or even a compiled C++ app would also be pretty trivial, like you suggested. Really, it is just a wrapper for gdb, so parsing the text and finding the PC/EXCVPC/STACK/OOM-Line are the only complicated tasks.

[igrr]

addr2line which has issues with reporting on the Xtensa architecture

FWIW if you update the binutils to a recent version (2.31), the issue will be solved. That version also improves objdump output by taking instruction padding into account (https://sourceware.org/git/gitweb.cgi?p=binutils-gdb.git;a=commit;h=4b8e28c79356265b2c111e044142fb6d6d2db44e).

[earlephilhower]

Good to see you still around, @igrr. Looks like we're OK to use addr2line:

2.5.2 release:

earle@server:~/Arduino/hardware/esp8266com/esp8266/tools$ ./xtensa-lx106-elf/bin/xtensa-lx106-elf-addr2line -v
GNU addr2line (GNU Binutils) 2.31.51.20180723
Copyright (C) 2018 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
This program is free software; you may redistribute it under the terms of
the GNU General Public License version 3 or (at your option) any later version.
This program has absolutely no warranty.

And we're at whatever GNU head is for the GCC 9.1 compiler chain:

earle@server:~/Arduino/hardware/esp8266com/esp8266/tools$ ./xtensa-lx106-elf/bin/xtensa-lx106-elf-addr2line -v
GNU addr2line (GNU Binutils) 2.32.51.20190713
Copyright (C) 2019 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
This program is free software; you may redistribute it under the terms of
the GNU General Public License version 3 or (at your option) any later version.
This program has absolutely no warranty.

[mcspr]

Just as an additional info, this small python script does the decoding using addr2line:
https://github.com/janLo/EspArduinoExceptionDecoder
(and https://github.com/me21/EspArduinoExceptionDecoder is the fork with Windows compatibility fixes)
No OOM parser though. But I can confirm that it does work fine with stack trace part, unlike the old toolchain with binutils-2.24.

Also, ref ESP8266 platform issue: platformio/platform-espressif8266#31

How would it be expected to be used though? PlatformIO cli supports additional custom "targets" (like -t checkprogsize, -t nobuild -t upload etc.), which can be configured per build environment. IDK how that would look in VSCode.
Or, one interesting option is to do something like idf_monitor.py (ref platformio/platform-espressif32#105 (comment)) and decode stack trace right when it happens in the serial monitor app (pio device monitor)

[earlephilhower]

Wow, a CLI decoder seems popular! It's trivial to add a pre-existing CLI tool to the release, but I'm definitely not the one to choose it since it seems other folks actually are running into problems.

Just on the fact that it's Python (and we have Python on Win in our tools dir) and cross platform, I'm inclined to either include https://github.com/me21/EspArduinoExceptionDecoder or list it in the readme so others can find it.

But PIO integration or VS.code, that seems like it needs to be handled in the respective repos, no?

[Niek]

Here's another vote for including the CLI decoder.

[d-a-v]

So which one(s) should we include as a submodule and document ?

1. https://github.com/janLo/EspArduinoExceptionDecoder
2. https://github.com/me21/EspArduinoExceptionDecoder (PR: Fixed running on Windows. Added ESP32 backtrace parsing. janLo/EspArduinoExceptionDecoder#5)
3. https://github.com/littleyoda/EspStackTraceDecoder
4. https://github.com/luffykesh/EspExceptionDecoder-CLI
5. Backtrace decoder for ESP32 platformio/platform-espressif32#105 (comment) (aka idf_monitor)