Re: backtrace() vs. _Unwind_Backtrace()

[Bryce McKinlay <bryce at mckinlay dot net dot nz>]

On Dec 7, 2003, at 12:21 AM, Andrew Haley wrote:

> I don't want it to sound like I'm opposed to the approach of calling
> _Unwind_Backtrace() directly.  It sounds quite a clean idea.  However,
> not every architecture supports DWARF2, and if we have a new
> architecture for unwinding we need to support those targets too.

The thing is, backtrace() alone doesn't help us much. Without DWARF2, 
we can't find the start of the function, and can't lookup the 
Class/Method. So why bother?

If we had an alternative way of finding the address ranges of each 
method, however, then it would make sense.

> I am also not keen on checking in a performance regression at this
> stage in 3.4.  It might be that the cost of
> _Unwind_FindEnclosingFunction is so much higher than that of unwinding
> the stack that the difference vanishes into the noise.  I don't know.

I don't know either, but I would guess that the linear searching done 
to find the FDE is a major reason why the _Unwind_ functions are slow. 
As part of an _Unwind_Backtrace, we can use _Unwind_GetRegionStart 
instead of _Unwind_FindEnclosingFunction - this avoids looking each FDE 
twice.

Regards

Bryce.