Re: What do frame pointers do?

[Russell King <rmk+lkml@arm.linux.org.uk>]

On Mon, Nov 03, 2003 at 01:29:09AM -0800, Bradley Chapman wrote:
> > Frame pointers enable more deterministic back tracing of the stack,
> > which can be helpful for tracking down bugs.  I build with
> > CONFIG_FRAME_POINTER enabled all of the time.

On ARM, simply scanning the kernel stack for addresses in the kernels
text segment or a module text tends to (or at least used to) return a
large quantity of noise.  This makes reading the backtrace nearly
impossible - not only does it contain real function pointers and
return addresses, but also pointers to literal pools and the like.

-- 
Russell King
 Linux kernel    2.6 ARM Linux   - http://www.arm.linux.org.uk/
 maintainer of:  2.6 PCMCIA      - http://pcmcia.arm.linux.org.uk/
                 2.6 Serial core