site_archiver@lists.apple.com Delivered-To: darwin-dev@lists.apple.com OK, thanks for helping to nail down what's going on. I've submitted a bug to Apple, #6718509: ------------------------------------------------------------------- When symbols are locally linked, the dladdr function on which backtrace_symbols is based will return the nearest preceding *external* symbol, which is often misleading, and basically renders dladdr/backtrace_symbols useless due to unreliability. Solutions: A. On linux there is a -rdynamic option for gcc, specifically to address this symbol lookup issue: -rdynamic Pass the flag -export-dynamic to the ELF linker, on targets that support it. This instructs the linker to add all symbols, not only used ones, to the dynamic symbol table. This option is needed for some uses of "dlopen" or to allow obtaining backtraces from within a program. So we could use something similar for OS X to force the linkage of symbols in the executable to be stored such that dladdr can find them. B. Switch backtrace_symbols to use the 'atos' tool's codebase instead of using dladdr. Understandably dladdr is only concerned with dynamically loaded symbols, but it would be nice if backtrace_symbols was more generic and could handle local/static symbols as well. C. Open 'atos' source or publicize the "symbolication" framework so we can emulate/customize atos functionality. popen()'ing a call to atos is kind of ugly, but of bigger concern is that atos does some kind of preprocessing of the entire symbol table, and for a large project like ours this takes ~10 seconds per launch of atos. So even if we have to stick with calling out to atos, it would be more usable if atos could be set to only process what was needed for the trace at hand instead of running through the entire symbol table right off the bat. _______________________________________________ Do not post admin requests to the list. They will be ignored. Darwin-dev mailing list (Darwin-dev@lists.apple.com) Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: http://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/darwin-dev/site_archiver%40lists.appl... This email sent to site_archiver@lists.apple.com