artiq
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m-labs
[RFC] add channel names to RTIO errors
At present RTIO errors (underflow, overflow, sequence) give only a channel number. That can make debugging experiment code quite painful.
It would be really nice if we provided more human-understandable channel descriptions as well as/instead of the channel numbers. Maybe grab a device name from the device db and then (as a luxury) add some driver-dependent additional information (something like dds0.spi).
+1; this is a surprisingly obvious idea that I can't believe didn't occur to me earlier.
(This would be especially useful in situations where you don't have a backtrace available, which often provides enough context otherwise.)
okay, thanks for the input @dnadlinger It felt so obvious that I wasn't sure if there was a reason it's actually completely infeasible.
Okay, I'll add that to our to fix list...
Obvious as in a feature that should obviously exist. :) The implementation might require some finesse, though, in terms of finding a way that avoids breaking the various abstractions as much as possible. Presumably the artiq.coredevice.core code would need to inspect the exception types, and on a match interpret the extra int data sent by the core device a certain way. Either way, I'd say it's definitely worth a small amount of complications.
A step on the way there would be a standalone tool (e.g. part of artiq_client) that resolves RTIO channel indices. This would still require adding some metadata to the device_db to resolve the channel ids, but would avoid messing with the EH machinery.
This also broke the tests. Good c591e7e305e98475fd293676cef19a030f7a260f https://nixbld.m-labs.hk/eval/5452 Bad 1852491102752c83f6689a316e61b8000454d4fa https://nixbld.m-labs.hk/eval/5456
