Stack trace from C program

[Sad Clouds]

Hi, is there a sane way of generating a stack trace from withink a C
program on *BSD?

For example, Solaris has walkcontext() and printstack() functions. It
doesn't look like there is anything similar on NetBSD.

Is there a portable way of implementing those functions, or does it
heavily depend on machine architecture and operating system?

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[Wouter Klouwen]

Post by Sad Clouds
Hi, is there a sane way of generating a stack trace from withink a C
program on *BSD?
For example, Solaris has walkcontext() and printstack() functions. It
doesn't look like there is anything similar on NetBSD.

glibc also has something to print a stack trace, but NetBSD has it's own
libc.

See: http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/6391

Post by Sad Clouds
Is there a portable way of implementing those functions, or does it
heavily depend on machine architecture and operating system?

Basically, no and yes. It is very compiler, libc and machine architecture
dependent.
The LJ article has a brief discussion on why exactly it's an extremely non
portable thing to do.

--Wouter

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[Sad Clouds]

On Tue, 25 May 2010 12:14:51 +0000

Post by Wouter Klouwen
Basically, no and yes. It is very compiler, libc and machine
architecture dependent.
The LJ article has a brief discussion on why exactly it's an
extremely non portable thing to do.
--Wouter

OK, thanks for the link. I think I'll go with #ifdef in my code and
call backtrace functions on platforms that support it, i.e. Linux or
Solaris.

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[Jeremy C. Reed]

Post by Sad Clouds
Hi, is there a sane way of generating a stack trace from withink a C
program on *BSD?
For example, Solaris has walkcontext() and printstack() functions. It
doesn't look like there is anything similar on NetBSD.
Is there a portable way of implementing those functions, or does it
heavily depend on machine architecture and operating system?

You may want to look at the recent BIND 9 source:
lib/isc/backtrace.c
lib/isc/include/isc/backtrace.h
(even in NetBSD src/external/bsd/bind/dist/)

It has comments and embedded docs explaining it. It provides examples
using backtrace() and gcc's Unwind_Backtrace() (on x86_64 or IA64). So
yes it is machine dependent.

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[Aleksey Cheusov]

Post by Sad Clouds
Hi, is there a sane way of generating a stack trace from withink a C
program on *BSD?

Have a look at wip/libstacktrace library.
It has the API similar to glibc's backtrace(3).
It works fine on {Free,Net,Open,DF,Mir}BSD, Solaris and Linux.

At the moment it depends on gcc's extensions:
__builtin_return_address and __builtin_frame_address.