xref: /external/pigweed/pw_cpu_exception_cortex_m/docs.rst

.. _module-pw_cpu_exception_cortex_m:

=========================
pw_cpu_exception_cortex_m
=========================
This backend provides an implementations for the CPU exception module frontend
for the following Cortex-M architectures:

* ARMv7-M - Cortex M3
* ARMv7-EM - Cortex M4, M7
* ARMv8-M Mainline - Cortex M33, M33P

It also includes a crash facade for a more detailed analysis of the CPU state.

Backend Setup
=============
There are a few ways to set up the Cortex M exception handler so the
application's exception handler is properly called during an exception.

1. Use existing CMSIS functions
-------------------------------
Inside of CMSIS fault handler functions, branch to ``pw_cpu_exception_Entry``.

.. code-block:: cpp

   __attribute__((naked)) void HardFault_Handler(void) {
   asm volatile(
       " ldr r0, =pw_cpu_exception_Entry  \n"
       " bx r0                            \n");
   }

2. Modify a startup file
------------------------
Assembly startup files for some microcontrollers initialize the interrupt
vector table. The functions to call for fault handlers can be changed here.
For ARMv7-M and ARMv8-M, the fault handlers are indexes 3 to 6 of the
interrupt vector table. It's also may be helpful to redirect the NMI handler
to the entry function (if it's otherwise unused in your project).

Default:

.. code-block:: cpp

   __isr_vector_table:
     .word  __stack_start
     .word  Reset_Handler
     .word  NMI_Handler
     .word  HardFault_Handler
     .word  MemManage_Handler
     .word  BusFault_Handler
     .word  UsageFault_Handler

Using CPU exception module:

.. code-block:: cpp

   __isr_vector_table:
     .word  __stack_start
     .word  Reset_Handler
     .word  pw_cpu_exception_Entry
     .word  pw_cpu_exception_Entry
     .word  pw_cpu_exception_Entry
     .word  pw_cpu_exception_Entry
     .word  pw_cpu_exception_Entry

Note: ``__isr_vector_table`` and ``__stack_start`` are example names, and may
vary by platform. See your platform's assembly startup script.

3. Modify interrupt vector table at runtime
-------------------------------------------
Some applications may choose to modify their interrupt vector tables at
runtime. The exception handler works with this use case (see the
exception_entry_test integration test), but keep in mind that your
application's exception handler will not be entered if an exception occurs
before the vector table entries are updated to point to
``pw_cpu_exception_Entry``.

.. _module-pw_cpu_exception_cortex_m-crash-facade-setup:

Crash Facade Setup
==================
The function ``AnalyzeCpuStateAndCrash()`` creates a condensed analysis of the
CPU state at crash time. It passes the given state along with a format string
and its arguments to ``PW_CPU_EXCEPTION_CORTEX_M_CRASH()``. The user must
implement the ``PW_CPU_EXCEPTION_CORTEX_M_HANDLE_CRASH()`` macro and the
``GetCrashThreadName()`` function, which must returna a null-terminated string
with the thread name at the time of the crash. The user can choose what to do
with the format string and arguments in their implementation of
``PW_CPU_EXCEPTION_CORTEX_M_HANDLE_CRASH()``. For example, the format string and
arguments can be tokenized to reduce the size of data collected at crash time or
a string can be composed and reported instead.

The function ``AnalyzeCpuStateAndCrash()`` can be called in the
``pw_cpu_exception_DefaultHandler()`` directly to delegate the crash handling
to the user-provided ``PW_CPU_EXCEPTION_CORTEX_M_HANDLE_CRASH()``
implementation.

Configuration Options
---------------------
- ``PW_CPU_EXCEPTION_CORTEX_M_CRASH_EXTENDED_CPU_ANALYSIS``: Enable extended
  analysis in ``AnalyzeCpuStateAndCrash()`` that collects important register
  values depending on the fault type.

Module Usage
============
For lightweight exception handlers that don't need to access
architecture-specific registers, using the generic exception handler functions
is preferred.

However, some projects may need to explicitly access architecture-specific
registers to attempt to recover from a CPU exception. ``pw_cpu_exception_State``
provides access to the captured CPU state at the time of the fault. When the
application-provided ``pw_cpu_exception_DefaultHandler()`` function returns, the
CPU state is restored. This allows the exception handler to modify the captured
state so that execution can safely continue.

Expected Behavior
-----------------
In most cases, the CPU state captured by the exception handler will contain the
basic register frame in addition to an extended set of registers
(see ``cpu_state.h``).

The exception to this is when the program stack pointer is in an MPU-protected
or otherwise invalid memory region when the CPU attempts to push the exception
register frame to it. In this situation, the PC, LR, and PSR registers will NOT
be captured and will be marked with ``0xFFFFFFFF`` to indicate they are invalid.
This backend will still be able to capture all the other registers though.

``0xFFFFFFFF`` is an illegal LR value, which is why it was selected for this
purpose. PC and PSR values of 0xFFFFFFFF are dubious too, so this constant is
clear enough at suggesting that the registers weren't properly captured.

In the situation where the main stack pointer is in a memory protected or
otherwise invalid region and fails to push CPU context, behavior is undefined.

Nested Exceptions
-----------------
To enable nested fault handling:

1. Enable separate detection of usage/bus/memory faults via the SHCSR.
2. Decrease the priority of the memory, bus, and usage fault handlers. This
   gives headroom for escalation.

While this allows some faults to nest, it doesn't guarantee all will properly
nest.

Configuration Options
=====================
- ``PW_CPU_EXCEPTION_CORTEX_M_EXTENDED_CFSR_DUMP``: Enable extended logging in
  ``pw::cpu_exception::LogCpuState()`` that dumps the active CFSR fields with
  help strings. This is disabled by default since it increases the binary size
  by >1.5KB when using plain-text logs, or ~460 Bytes when using tokenized
  logging. It's useful to enable this for device bringup until your application
  has an end-to-end crash reporting solution.
- ``PW_CPU_EXCEPTION_CORTEX_M_LOG_LEVEL``: The log level to use for this module.
  Logs below this level are omitted.

Exception Analysis
==================
This module provides Python tooling to analyze CPU state captured by a Cortex-M
core during an exception. This can be useful as part of a crash report analyzer.

CFSR decoder
------------
The ARMv7-M and ARMv8-M architectures have a Configurable Fault Status Register
(CFSR) that explains what illegal behavior caused a fault. This module provides
a simple command-line tool to decode CFSR contents (e.g. 0x00010000) as
human-readable information (e.g. "Encountered invalid instruction").

For example:

.. code-block::

   $ python -m pw_cpu_exception_cortex_m.cfsr_decoder 0x00010100
   20210412 15:11:14 INF Exception caused by a usage fault, bus fault.

   Active Crash Fault Status Register (CFSR) fields:
   IBUSERR     Instruction bus error.
       The processor attempted to issue an invalid instruction. It
       detects the instruction bus error on prefecting, but this
       flag is only set to 1 if it attempts to issue the faulting
       instruction. When this bit is set, the processor has not
       written a fault address to the BFAR.
   UNDEFINSTR  Encountered invalid instruction.
       The processor has attempted to execute an undefined
       instruction. When this bit is set to 1, the PC value stacked
       for the exception return points to the undefined instruction.
       An undefined instruction is an instruction that the processor
       cannot decode.

   All registers:
   cfsr       0x00010100

.. note::
   The CFSR is not supported on ARMv6-M CPUs (Cortex M0, M0+, M1).

--------------------
Snapshot integration
--------------------
This ``pw_cpu_exception`` backend provides helper functions that capture CPU
exception state to snapshot protos.

SnapshotCpuState()
==================
``SnapshotCpuState()`` captures the ``pw_cpu_exception_State`` to a
``pw.cpu_exception.cortex_m.ArmV7mCpuState`` protobuf encoder.


SnapshotMainStackThread()
=========================
``SnapshotMainStackThread()`` captures the main stack's execution thread state
if active either from a given ``pw_cpu_exception_State`` or from the current
running context. It captures the thread name depending on the processor mode,
either ``Main Stack (Handler Mode)`` or ``Main Stack (Thread Mode)``. The stack
limits must be provided along with a stack processing callback. All of this
information is captured by a ``pw::thread::Thread`` protobuf encoder.

.. note::
   To minimize how much of the snapshot handling callstack is captured in the
   stack trace, provide the ``pw_cpu_exception_State`` collected by the
   exception entry (For example, as provided by
   ``pw_cpu_exception_DefaultHandler()``)
   instead of capturing the stack pointer just before calling into this
   function.

Python processor
================
This module's included Python exception analyzer tooling provides snapshot
integration via a ``process_snapshot()`` function that produces a multi-line
dump from a serialized snapshot proto, for example:

.. code-block::

   Exception caused by a usage fault.

   Active Crash Fault Status Register (CFSR) fields:
   UNDEFINSTR  Undefined Instruction UsageFault.
       The processor has attempted to execute an undefined
       instruction. When this bit is set to 1, the PC value stacked
       for the exception return points to the undefined instruction.
       An undefined instruction is an instruction that the processor
       cannot decode.

   All registers:
   pc         0x0800e1c4 example::Service::Crash(_example_service_CrashRequest const&, _pw_protobuf_Empty&) (src/example_service/service.cc:131)
   lr         0x0800e141 example::Service::Crash(_example_service_CrashRequest const&, _pw_protobuf_Empty&) (src/example_service/service.cc:128)
   psr        0x81000000
   msp        0x20040fd8
   psp        0x20001488
   exc_return 0xffffffed
   cfsr       0x00010000
   mmfar      0xe000ed34
   bfar       0xe000ed38
   icsr       0x00000803
   hfsr       0x40000000
   shcsr      0x00000000
   control    0x00000000
   r0         0xe03f7847
   r1         0x714083dc
   r2         0x0b36dc49
   r3         0x7fbfbe1a
   r4         0xc36e8efb
   r5         0x69a14b13
   r6         0x0ec35eaa
   r7         0xa5df5543
   r8         0xc892b931
   r9         0xa2372c94
   r10        0xbd15c968
   r11        0x759b95ab
   r12        0x00000000

Module Configuration Options
============================
The following configurations can be adjusted via compile-time configuration of
this module, see the
:ref:`module documentation <module-structure-compile-time-configuration>` for
more details.

.. c:macro:: PW_CPU_EXCEPTION_CORTEX_M_LOG_LEVEL

   The log level to use for this module. Logs below this level are omitted.

   This defaults to ``PW_LOG_LEVEL_DEBUG``.

.. c:macro:: PW_CPU_EXCEPTION_CORTEX_M_EXTENDED_CFSR_DUMP

   Enables extended logging in pw::cpu_exception::LogCpuState() and
   pw::cpu_exception::cortex_m::LogExceptionAnalysis() that dumps the active
   CFSR fields with help strings. This is disabled by default since it
   increases the binary size by >1.5KB when using plain-text logs, or ~460
   Bytes when using tokenized logging. It's useful to enable this for device
   bringup until your application has an end-to-end crash reporting solution.

   This is disabled by default.