[FFmpeg-devel] Debug builds and if (ARCH_...) linking issues

[wm4]

On Thu, 13 Apr 2017 17:39:57 +1000
Matt Oliver <protogonoi at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 13 April 2017 at 17:20, Aaron Levinson <alevinsn at aracnet.com> wrote:
> 
> > I wanted to build a debug build of ffmpeg using Visual C++ today, one
> > without any optimizations.  This implies the use of the -Od compiler
> > option.  Unfortunately, I quickly discovered that the build fails soon
> > after it starts because it can't find certain architecture-specific
> > references.  For example, in libavutil/cpu.c, there is the following:
> >
> >     if (ARCH_AARCH64)
> >         return ff_get_cpu_flags_aarch64();
> >
> > The linker couldn't find ff_get_cpu_flags_aarch64 (and other similar
> > references) and failed.  This isn't an issue when optimizations are turned
> > on because the compiler notices that ARCH_AARCH64 is defined as 0 and
> > eliminates the relevant code.
> >
> > Effectively, successful builds of ffmpeg depend on this compiler
> > optimization.  This appears to have been the standard practice in the
> > ffmpeg code base for at least the last few years, but it is unclear to me
> > why this approach is being used, since, in addition to depending on
> > specific compiler behavior, it prevents fully debug builds from succeeding,
> > at least with Visual C++.
> >
> > If people like the if (ARCH_...) syntax, while it wouldn't look quite as
> > nice, what's wrong with doing the following:
> >
> > #if ARCH_AARCH64
> >     if (ARCH_AARCH64)
> >         return ff_get_cpu_flags_aarch64();
> > #endif
> >
> > Another, much less desirable option is to use #pragma optimize for the
> > relevant functions in ffmpeg to turn optimizations on for specific
> > functions.
> >
> > A third option would be to build only the relevant files with
> > optimizations turned on, but this will end up making the Makefiles more
> > complicated, and the relative simplicity of the Makefiles is appealing.
> >
> > For now, I'm using both -Od and -Og with Visual C++ (-Og turns on some
> > optimizations, but not as much as -O1 or -O2), but this isn't the same as a
> > true debug build.
> >  
> 
> Similar patches have been submitted before. This is an issue with Dead Code
> Elimination (DCE) within FFmpeg and the fact the MSVC doesn't support
> removing it in debug builds.
> 
> There have been some discussions on the mailing list in the past about
> resolving this but nothing was ever decided.
> 
> As a quick and dirty work around I have a tool that i wrote that scans in
> the configure/makefile from a ffmpeg distro and generates a native Visual
> Studio project file that can be used to just compile within Visual Studio
> itself. You just pass it the desired configure options that you want to use
> to build the project and it will make one for you. The main thing is that
> it scans the source and automatically generates the missing DCE sections
> and adds them so that everything will compile correctly with Debug builds
> and you can debug directly in VS. You can find the tool here
> http://shiftmediaproject.github.io/1-projects/ (normally i wouldn't put
> external references on the mailing list but this may be of use to you).

Any chance you could revive your old patches to remove the DCE
requirement? (Not sure if there were any patches.)

Before you do any real work, make a thread on the ML requesting
comments on this. Although I would very much welcome such patches, I'm
not fully sure about others.

This DCE requirement is pretty painful, and affects debugging on Linux
as well.