Re: [PATCH] scripts: add script for translating stack dump function offsets

Linus Torvalds
2016-09-16T18:12:20Z

On Fri, Sep 16, 2016 at 7:48 AM, Josh Poimboeuf <jpoimboe@redhat.com> wrote:
>
> Here's something a lot faster than gdb, which also handles duplicate
> symbols properly.

Ack.

Side note: I find addr2line almost completely useless in many cases
not because of address space randomization, but because of how complex
the inlining often is. I just had something where I decided to use
addr2line and it just pointed me to the __read_once_size_nocheck()
line in <linux/compiler.h>. That was not very useful.

I ended up actually looking at the instructions *around* it, to find
where that one instruction had been inlined from.

So I'm wondering if this kind of helper script could be extended to
have that "look around it" thing to help.

Finally, I note that *if* you hit the "multiple copies of the same
function name" issue, it might be a good idea to limit the function
name copies by their size/offset. Also, shouldn't you filter the
objdump for just functions Both the size and the function filtering
should be possible with some additional awk script magic.

For example, in my current kernel build, I have the following object
names that are both functions and non-functions:

event_function, irq_trigger, p_start, tbl_size, verbose, watchdog

and I have 10 different versions of the function ("type_show()", with
sizes ranging from 26 bytes to 166 bytes. So both the function offset
filtering and the type filtering could definitely make a difference.

Linus