How to get a call stack backtrace? (deeply embedded, no library support)

Question

I want my exception handlers and debug functions to be able to print call stack backtraces, basically just like the backtrace() library function in glibc. Unfortunately, my C li

Answer 1

Since ARM platforms do not use a frame pointer, you never quite know how big the stackframe is and cannot simply roll out the stack beyond the single return value in R14.

When investigating a crash for which we do not have debug symbols, we simply dump the whole stack and lookup the closest symbol to each item in the instruction range. It does generate a load of false positives but can still be very useful for investigating crashes.

If you are running pure ELF executables, you can separate debug symbols out of your release executable. gdb can then help you find out what is going on from your standard unix core dump