4.3. User-Space Stack Backtraces
The probe point (pp
) function indicates which particular event triggered the the SystemTap event handler. A probe on the entry into a function would list the function name. However, in many cases the same probe point event may be triggered by many different modules in the program; this is particularly true for functions in shared libraries. A SystemTap backtrace of the user-space stack can provide additional context on how the probe point event is triggered.
The user-space stack backtrace generation is complicated by the compiler producing code optimized to eliminate stack frame pointers. However, the compiler also includes information in the debug information section to allow debugging tools to produce stack backtraces. SystemTap user-space stack backtrace mechanism makes use of that debug information to walk the stack to generate stack traces for 32-bit and 64-bit x86 processors; other processor architectures do not yet support the use of debug information to unwind the user-space stack. You will need to use the -d executable
for the application executable and -ldd
for shared libraries to ensure that the needed debug information is used to produce the user-space stack backtraces.
If you want to see how the function xmalloc
function is being called by the command ls
, you could use the user-space backtrack functions to provide that information. With the debuginfo for the ls
command installed the following SystemTap command will provide a backtrace each time the xmalloc
function is called:
stap -d /bin/ls --ldd \
-e 'probe process("ls").function("xmalloc") {print_ustack(ubacktrace())}' \
-c "ls /"
When the SystemTap script runs will have output similar to the following:
bin dev lib media net proc sbin sys var
boot etc lib64 misc op_session profilerc selinux tmp
cgroup home lost+found mnt opt root srv usr
0x4116c0 : xmalloc+0x0/0x20 [/bin/ls]
0x4116fc : xmemdup+0x1c/0x40 [/bin/ls]
0x40e68b : clone_quoting_options+0x3b/0x50 [/bin/ls]
0x4087e4 : main+0x3b4/0x1900 [/bin/ls]
0x3fa441ec5d : __libc_start_main+0xfd/0x1d0 [/lib64/libc-2.12.so]
0x402799 : _start+0x29/0x2c [/bin/ls]
0x4116c0 : xmalloc+0x0/0x20 [/bin/ls]
0x4116fc : xmemdup+0x1c/0x40 [/bin/ls]
0x40e68b : clone_quoting_options+0x3b/0x50 [/bin/ls]
0x40884a : main+0x41a/0x1900 [/bin/ls]
0x3fa441ec5d : __libc_start_main+0xfd/0x1d0 [/lib64/libc-2.12.so]
...
For more details on the functions available for user-space stack backtraces look at the ucontext-symbols.stp
and ucontext-unwind.stp
tapsets. The descriptions of the functions in those tapsets can also be found in the SystemTap Tapset Reference Manual.