Skia Debugger (deprecated)

Introduction

The Skia Debugger is a graphical tool used to step through and analyze the contents of the Skia picture format. Pre-requisites include installing the Qt Library and downloading the Skia code base.

Qt is available here: http://qt-project.org/downloads.

It can also be installed on linux using

sudo apt-get install libqt4-dev

Note that the debugger has been tested with Qt 4.8.6; it is known not to work with Qt 5.0RC1 on the Mac.

Design Documents:

https://docs.google.com/a/google.com/document/d/1b8muqVzfbJmYbno9nTv5721V2nlFMfnqXYLNHiSQ4ws/pub

How to build and run

Because the debugger uses Qt, you'll need to build skia in 64 bit mode:

GYP_DEFINES="skia_arch_width=64" python bin/sync-and-gyp
ninja -C out/Debug debugger
out/Debug/debugger

For Windows, Qt ships as 32 bit libraries so to build and run one should just be able to:

cd trunk
make clean gyp
<open solution in VS2010 and build everything>

Depending on how your Qt is installed you may also need to define an environment variable like:

GYP_DEFINES=qt_sdk='C:\Qt\4.8.6\'

(which needs to be set before you execute ‘make gyp’)

On Windows, you may need to copy several DLL and PDB files from %QTDIR%\bin into your executable directory (out/Debug or out/Release):

QtCore4.dll QtCored4.dll QtCored4.pdb

QtGui4.dll QtGuid4.dll QtGuid4.pdb

QtOpenGL4.dll QtOpenGLd4.dll QtOpenGLd4.pdb

Producing SKPs for usage

You may either use the Skia testing images (GMs) for use in the debugger or create your own via chromium.

To create SKPs from Chromium you must download and build chromium on your platform of choice: http://www.chromium.org/Home

cd src
make chrome
out/Debug/chrome --no-sandbox --enable-gpu-benchmarking --force-compositing-mode

After which go to Tools, Settings, Javascript Console and type:

chrome.gpuBenchmarking.printToSkPicture(dirname)

Using the Debugger

The debugger is fairly straight forward to use once a picture is loaded in. We can step through different commands via the up and down keys, and clicking on the command in the list. We can pause execution of commands with the pause button in order to inspect the details of the command in the inspector tabs down below.

Command	Function
x	toggles the visibility of the selected command
alt-x	clears all hidden commands
ctrl-x	shows all deleted commands
b	creates a breakpoint on a command
alt-b	clears all breakpoints
ctrl-b	shows all breakpoints
ctrl-r	rewinds the picture to the first command
ctrl-p	plays to the next breakpoint or last command
ctrl-i	Toggles the inspector and settings widgets
ctrl-d	Toggles the directory widget
space	Pauses drawing execution
ctrl-o	Opens a file dialog for loading pictures
ctrl-s	Saves the skp if you deleted any commands
ctrl-shift-s	Saves the skp under the new specified name
ctrl-q	Quits

Debugger interface