Navigating the trace in Axion

Debugger-like navigation

Axion comes with a set of commands to browse the trace and set the currently selected transition in a debugger-like fashion: step into, step out, step over... forward and backward in the trace.

Overview

Step out

Use step out to exit the current function:

• step out forward to go to the instruction after the ret.
• step out backward to go the call instruction.

Step into and step over

Forward

On a call instruction, use:

• step into to enter the function (go to the ret)
• step over to skip the function and go to the instruction after the ret

On any other instruction, step into and step over would both go to the next instruction.

Backward

After a ret instruction, use:

• step into backward to enter the function
• step over backward to skip the function and go to the call instruction.

On any other instruction, step into backward and step over backward would both go to the previous instruction.

Reaching the ends of the trace

If the destination of a debugging command was not recorded in the trace (comes from before or after the trace), the step action has no effect and a message is displayed in the status bar and logged in the log widget

Axion percent plugin

The percent plugin adds the capability of jumping between stack memory accesses. If the currently selected instruction writes something on the stack, percent will go to the next instruction reading the memory. Conversely, if the current instruction is reading some value on the stack, percent will jump to the previous instruction writing the memory. In practice, this is very useful to follow push/pop operands or call/ret boundaries.

The plugin is named percent as it has been designed to work like the vim editor percent keybinding on curly brackets.

The default key binding for this plugin is %. If you wish to modify this binding, use the shortcut configuration panel in Axion