Notes on current vogl limitations

All debuggers have limitations. Most of the time, you don't really know what they are until they pop up while you're trying to debug something (usually at the worst time, after wasting many hours). So here's a list of vogl limitations/issues I've been compiling (which will go up on the wiki once it's setup):

Note: All this is on the vogl wiki now: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/vogl/wiki

• We don't support LD_PRELOAD-style tracing on Optimus setups. 

I would like to support it, but honestly it's challenging enough to do this on vanilla desktop stacks. Once you throw 2 drivers in there all bets are off with all the tracers I've tried. Any help in this area would be great.

We do support manually loading our tracer (libvogltrace32/64.so) on Optimus, but it's not something I've had the time to test much. To do this, manually load libvogltrace and dlsym() the gliGetProcAddressRAD()function (to be renamed to voglGetProcAddress()).

• Can't take state snapshots during tracing or replaying while any buffers are currently mapped. 

This is typically not a problem because almost all apps just map a buffer, poke around inside the mapped region (reading and/or writing with the CPU), then unmap and move on.

I'm currently working on removing this restriction during replaying (which is easy because we fully control all GL contexts during replaying), but reliably removing this limitation during tracing in all scenarios seems challenging.

• PBO (pixel pack and unpack buffers) not supported in the current github drop

This is already implemented and is being tested with Steam 10ft traces. I'll hopefully push it up by the end of the week.

• GL 4.x is not supported for full-stream or snapshotting

There's a lot of GL 4.x stuff that will work, but it's not been a priority to support the latest bleeding edge stuff. Almost all shipped GL products I'm seeing only use GL 3.x, at best. Interestingly, the biggest/most ported releases tend to use a very conservative set of GL v2/v3.

• Cubemap arrays not supported for snapshotting yet (but are OK for full-stream)

Here's the list of texture types we can snapshot: 1D, 2D, RECTANGLE, CUBE_MAP, 1D_ARRAY, 2D_ARRAY, 3D, 2D_MULTISAMPLE, and 2D_MULTISAMPLE_ARRAY. Incomplete textures are OK, but you'll get a warning if you haven't properly set GL_TEXTURE_MAX_LEVEL (which you most definitely should always do because not doing so is unreliable in practice).

• Abuse of GL handles+multiple contexts

Sadly GL handles behave in interesting and obscure ways once you introduce sharelists. So before you delete textures (and most other objects) you should make sure they are not bound on other contexts before you delete them, otherwise you're going down a direction that you'll probably regret (and that will give vogl headaches). vogl will give you errors on this scenario when you try to snapshot. For example:

Let's say you create a second context that shares with your first context. It gens a texture (handle=1), binds it on both contexts, calls glTexStorage() to initialize it, then deletes the texture on the 1st context. Everything appears as expected on the 1st context: the texture becomes auto-unbound, glIsTexture() reports false, and I can't retrieve the texture's width anymore (using glGetTexLevelParameteriv()). All nice and neat.

But on the 2nd context, the texture remains bound, glIsTexture() returns false, but I can still retrieve the texture's width. If I call glGenTextures() handle 1 gets immediately reused, even though it's still bound (as reported by glGet() on GL_TEXTURE_BINDING_2D) and even though I can retrieve texture 1's width. At this point handle 1 means two different things (!) on this specific context, which is most wonderful. If I then rebind texture handle 1 (which was just re-genned) I can no longer retrieve the width.

• Can't snapshot textures after they are deleted (but still bound elsewhere)

We support snapshotting shaders that have been attached to programs and then immediately deleted. We also support snapshotting programs that have been deleted but are still bound. These are pretty common GL patterns we've seen in a few major titles. At program link time we make a deep copy of all attached shaders (called the "link time snapshot" in the code), so we can guarantee we can snapshot and recreate the program's actual linked state no matter what the app does with the shaders after linking.

However, there are other scenarios (such as binding a texture to a FBO, then deleting the texture but keeping it bound to the FBO) that we don't fully support for snapshotting. This scenario may never be fully supported: the last time I tried I couldn't query state of deleted (but still bound) textures on at least one driver, and we're not going to deeply shadow all texture state to work around this. Luckily, I've only ever seen this done purposely in one app so far, and the attached texture was not actually used for rendering purposes after the deletion. (They kept it attached to keep their hands on the GPU memory so the driver wouldn't reclaim it.)

vogl will spit out an error and typically try to continue snapshotting when it encounters a handle attached to an object that has been deleted (and we've lost track of). You'll get a handle remap error, because we won't know how to remap the handle from the GL replay domain back into the trace domain. The snapshot may cause the replayer to diverge, though.

• During replaying the default (GLX) framebuffer is always 32-bit RGBA, no MSAA, with a 24/8 depth stencil buffer. 

On the todo list, but this hasn't been a problem so far. Apps that use MSAA tend to use renderbuffers or maybe MSAA textures, probably because this is more portable (vs. mucking around with the default GLX framebuffer's setup). It's possible for an app replay to diverge if the default framebuffer has a configuration that it didn't have during tracing, but in practice I haven't seen this happen.

• Replay window auto-resizing can be a problem in some apps

Unlike apitrace, we only use a single replay window and resize it as needed. The auto-resize logic can get stuck resizing too much. This problem pops up most often in GLUT/FreeGLUT apps. We can capture/replay them, but the replayer's window code tends to get confused by the GLUT UI window activity. It'll still replay properly, but slowly as the replayer auto-resizes the replay window. 

If the window auto-resizes too much use "-lock_window_dimensions -width X -height Y" on the voglreplay command line to lock the replay window to a fixed size.

We may switch to apitrace-style multiple windows, or maybe pbuffers, to work around this (needs investigation).

• We can't snapshot inside of glBegin/glEnd regions.

We didn't think it was worth the extra complexity to be able to snapshot/restore incomplete glBegin sequence, so either snapshot right before or right after the region. (Hey, at least we support snapshotting apps that use glBegin at all!)

• Display list limitations

No recursion and no resources can be bound in the display list but textures. We do support around 400 API's inside of display lists. GL display lists are ancient API's at this point, so I don't think we'll do much more in this area unless a big title from the past uses them. (We do already support Doom3's usage of GL display lists, though.)

• Be careful deleting contexts that share lists with other contexts

We support tracing/replaying/snapshotting/restoring the state of multiple contexts. vogl has the concept of "root" contexts and "sharelist groups". A sharelist group is 2 or more contexts that share objects, and the first context created in this group (that doesn't, and can't, share with anything else) is marked as the "root" context for that group.

vogl can't snapshot state if the "root" context of a sharelist group is destroyed while other leaf contexts are still present. Either snapshot immediately after all the leaf contexts are destroyed, or reorder your context deletions so the root gets killed last. In 99% of cases none of this matters; most apps just delete all their contexts at once or just leak them at exit.

• Forking while tracing

I've encountered problems with this on some apps (mostly Mono ones I think). Needs investigation, we haven't tested it.

• Try to delete your contexts when exiting

We've got several hooks in there to make sure the trace is properly flushed and closed when apps exit and leak their contexts. These hooks work most of the time, but it's best if you properly tear down your contexts when you exit.

The replayer does support unflushed traces (with no trace archive at the end), but there are no guarantees.

Also, not properly tearing down your contexts before exiting actually makes it very difficult for us to fully flush any in-progress asynchronous PBO readbacks (used for real-time JPEG capturing).

• UI limitations

The entire UI is still very, very new. The texture, renderbuffer, and default framebuffer viewer in particular is very basic. It has little support for viewing traces that have multiple contexts.

Peter Lohrmann is working on improving the UI. We're currently using it to help us debug the debugger itself, which is progress, but there's a bunch of work left before I would try using it to debug a title with it.

• Driver compat

I've tested the most on NVidia, a moderate amount on AMD, and (unfortunately) very little on Intel's open source driver so far. (Not purposely - it's just a time limitation.) We mostly ping-pong between NVidia and AMD as driver bugs pop up and we wait for the vendor to provide us with fixes. A developer at LunarG is now helping us get vogl working on Intel's open source driver.

• Program binary gotchas

If you trace a 32-bit app that uses program binaries, on at least 1 driver (NVidia) you must replay using the 32-bit replayer (same for 64-bit). You can forcefully disable the app's usage of program binaries while tracing using --vogl_disable_gl_program_binary. This flag causes the tracer to remove the GL_ARB_get_program_binary extension string, and it'll also force the driver to always fail links with program bins (in case you don't check the string).

We've gone back and forth with always disabling program binaries by default in the tracer, but at the end of the day we take the policy of changing the app's behavior during tracing as little as possible unless you have purposely chosen to override something.

Note program binaries are usually *extremely* fragile, so traces containing program binaries may only be replayable on the exact driver version you captured them on.

• Can't take a snapshotting while tracing if other threads have contexts current

We take the snapshot immediately after the next glXSwapBuffers() call. The tracer will attempt to make each context current on the same thread that calls glXSwapBuffer()'s so it can take a snapshot, but it won't be able to do this if the app has the context current on the other thread. So don't leave your contexts current across swaps if you want to take a snapshot. (We couldn't think of a reliable/robust way around this limitation.)

To snapshot during tracing, write a file named "__trigger_capture__" to the app's current directory and the tracer will immediately take a snapshot. You can take as many snapshots as you want while tracing. (Of course, you can't have specified "--vogl_tracefile X" on your command line, which would have put the tracer into full-stream mode.) I'll better document this within a day or so, for now just search the code in vogl_intercept.cpp.

• Replayer whitelist

If the tracer encounters a GL/GLX function it knows the replayer won't be able to handle it'll give you an error when it encounters the call. The call will be written to the trace as best the tracer can, and the call will go directly to the driver, but the replayer will ignore it (after spitting out an error message). When you exit the traced app, you'll get a list of non-whitelisted funcs that were actually called during tracing. The func whitelist is the union of the API's contained in two files:
https://github.com/ValveSoftware/vogl/blob/master/glspec/gl_glx_whitelisted_funcs.txt
https://github.com/ValveSoftware/vogl/blob/master/glspec/gl_glx_simple_replay_funcs.txt

You can still try to replay this trace, but it may diverge or horribly fail. To see a more detailed whitelist, run the "voglgen" tool with the -debug option in the glspec directory.

Some of the newer GL debug related funcs aren't in the whitelist yet, I'll be adding them in very soon.

You'll get warnings if you call GetProcAddress() on GL/GLX functions that are not in the whitelist. This is typically harmless, most apps use GL extension libraries that retrieve the addresses of hundreds to thousands of GL funcs they never actually call.