Re: [libunwind] Unwinding using the context passed to a signal handler (doesn't work)

[David Mosberger]

>>>>> On Fri, 26 Mar 2004 11:03:13 -0800, "Young, Mark" <address@hidden> said:

  Mark> David, Do all platforms make the same distinction between
  Mark> asynchronous (signal) and synchronous contexts?

Most platforms store the entire machine-state in a sigcontext.
Most platforms do not have 256+ registers to deal with.

  Mark> I like Johan's suggestion of an alternate unw_init_local
  Mark> interface (unw_init_from_signal_context_local) that takes the
  Mark> signal context as the starting point.

And I don't like it at all, because it won't work anyhow _unless_ you
first save the preserved state.  And if you have to do that anyhow,
unw_getcontext() is just as fast and much cleaner.

  Mark> From what you are saying, an ia64 implementation of this would
  Mark> have to ignore the signal context, call getcontext, and unwind
  Mark> until it found the signal frame.

It doesn't ignore the signal context, it's just that you start with
the preserved state returned by unw_getcontext() and then the
sigcontext() gets picked up later on.

  Mark> But is that true for all platforms?

No, but I certainly don't want to design an API that _requires_ saving
the full machine-state in sigcontext.

I find it kind of funny how we all claim to be after performance, but
then I get complaints about the key optimization that makes
signal-delivery fast on ia64 linux (in fact, comparable or even faster
than on x86 linux, which I think is quite an achievement considering
how much bigger the machine state is for ia64).  If you don't believe
me, try measuring signal delivery overhead on some other ia64 OSes.

        --david