[TUHS] PDP-8

[M. Warner Losh]

In message: <20101002210346.GE27937 at bitmover.com>
            Larry McVoy <lm at bitmover.com> writes:
: > > If you could look at the stack frames and give me a stack trace
: > > that's more or less the same thing.
: > 
: > (gdb) bt
: > 
: > The real question is not to get a stack trace, but to analyse it.
: 
: Hmm, we seem to have a different view.  I like people who can write
: the gdb bt code, not run it.  This isn't an imaginary thing, one of 
: my guys showed up one day with his own hand rolled backtrace that we
: ended up putting in our product for support.
: 
: The advantage of his, over the following hack we had before, was that
: it worked when no gdb was installed (windows):
: 
: void
: gdb_backtrace(void)
: {
:         FILE    *f;
:         char    *cmd;
: 
:         unless (getenv("_BK_BACKTRACE")) return;
:         unless ((f = efopen("BK_TTYPRINTF")) ||
:             (f = fopen(DEV_TTY, "w"))) {
:                 f = stderr;
:         }
:         cmd = aprintf("gdb -batch -ex backtrace '%s/bk' %u 1>&%d 2>&%d",
:             bin, getpid(), fileno(f), fileno(f));
: 
:         system(cmd);
:         free(cmd);
:         if (f != stderr) fclose(f);
: }

Stack back traces are easy on x86, but get a lot harder on !x86 at
high optimization layers without help from libunwind.  That's the down
side of not relying on gdb... :)

Warner