[Libunwind-devel] RFC: libunwind-coredump.h ?

[Denys Vlasenko]

Hi,

For the needs of ABRT project, I need to extract backtrace
from a coredump. Currently we use gdb for this, but
we want to do it without gdb.

At first I attempted to just use remote unwinding feature
of libunwind for this, but quickly discovered that
I can't easily implement find_proc_info():
I would need to implement DWARF parsing.

Looks like the one relatively easy way forward is to extend
libunwind. This way I can use its internal DWARF parsing code.

I looked at libunwind-ptrace.h API for unwinding the stack
of an existing live process and I started adapting
its code to do the same on a coredump file (which is
essentially just an image of a "dead process",
so the adaptation seems to be not too hard).
Basically, it would add libunwind-coredump.h
with an API which is similar to libunwind-ptrace.h

At the moment I have a semi-working code and I continue
working on it. It is not yet ready for review.

Meanwhile, I would like to ask libunwind developers
whether they would accept such an extension in principle.

Any other thoughts/suggestions are welcome too.

--
vda