The return of the frame pointers

Debuggers and profilers can be subtly or obviously broken, and one common issue is missing frame pointers in the default libc. This leads to issues in stack walking, reflected in flame graphs, where partial stacks are grouped together. Some profilers, like off-CPU flame graphs, are heavily impacted by missing frame pointers in library code and applications. However, recent updates in Fedora and Ubuntu now compile libc and more with frame pointers by default, fixing these flame graphs and making profiling easier. Despite past decisions to omit frame pointers for performance reasons, recent advancements have highlighted the importance of frame pointers in facilitating profiling and debugging.

https://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2024-03-17/the-return-of-the-frame-pointers.html

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