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  1. Qt Creator
  2. QTCREATORBUG-19863

Add more stack unwinding options

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    • Task
    • Resolution: Unresolved
    • P3: Somewhat important
    • None
    • Qt Creator 4.6.0-beta1, Qt Creator 4.7.0-beta1
    • Perfparser
    • None

    Description

      dwarf unwinding is rather inefficient as it requires us to take large stack snapshots for each sample and adds a lot of CPU overhead on the host. This severely limits how much samples we can take in a given time and impacts our ability to do, for example, memory profiling.

      There is an ARM-specific debug info format ("exidx" IIRC) we could process on the target, similar to how the frame pointer unwinding works. Then we only need to transfer a list of pointers to the host, not the whole stack. That would require hacking the kernel. We might be able to upstream the resulting patches, though.

      There also is a technique to get up to 16 last branches at a very low cost on certain intel CPUs which might be enough to reconstruct a somewhat usable stack.

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            ulherman Ulf Hermann
            ulherman Ulf Hermann
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              Created:
              Updated:

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