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by brancz 917 days ago
Profiling tools have already solved the ability to reliably unwind in the absence of frame pointers[1], but there are plenty of tools that this kind of investment is simply too much that it won't ever happen, like bpftrace or bcc-tools.

[1] https://www.polarsignals.com/blog/posts/2022/11/29/dwarf-bas...

1 comments

Do those tools really need to implement their own unwinding though? This really should just need to be implemented once in a library and then used wherever unwinding is needed.
With the combination of eBPF and DWARF-based it's not quite that simple, there's a pretty elaborate dance between user-space and kernel-space that needs to happen for this to work. With frame-pointers it's walking a linked list in kernel-space.