In Linux, to get a backtrace you can use backtrace() library call, but it only returns backtrace of current thread. Is there any way to get a backtrace of some other thread, assuming I know it's TID (or pthread_t) and I can guarantee it sleeps?
It seems that libunwind (http://www.nongnu.org/libunwind/) project can help. The problem is that it is not supported by CentOS, so I prefer not to use it.
Any other ideas? Thanks.
To display the backtrace for several or all of the threads, use the command thread apply (see thread apply). For example, if you type thread apply all backtrace , gdb will display the backtrace for all the threads; this is handy when you debug a core dump of a multi-threaded program.
To print a backtrace of the entire stack, use the backtrace command, or its alias bt . This command will print one line per frame for frames in the stack. By default, all stack frames are printed. You can stop the backtrace at any time by typing the system interrupt character, normally Ctrl-c .
The usual way to inspect a backtrace of a program is to use an external debugger such as gdb. However, sometimes it is useful to obtain a backtrace programmatically from within a program, e.g., for the purposes of logging or diagnostics. The header file execinfo.
Java Thread getStackTrace() method The getStackTrace() method of thread class returns an array of stack trace elements representing the stack dump of the thread. The first element of an array represents the top of the stack which is the last method invocation in the sequence.
I implemented that myself here.
Initially, I wanted to implement something similar as suggested here, i.e. getting somehow the top frame pointer of the thread and unwinding it manually (the linked source is derived from Apples backtrace
implementation, thus might be Apple-specific, but the idea is generic).
However, to have that safe (and the source above is not and may even be broken anyway), you must suspend the thread while you access its stack. I searched around for different ways to suspend a thread and found this, this and this. Basically, there is no really good way. The common hack, also used by the Hotspot JAVA VM, is to use signals and sending a custom signal to your thread via pthread_kill.
So, as I would need such signal-hack anyway, I can have it a bit simpler and just use backtrace
inside the called signal handler which is executed in the target thread (as also suggested here by sandeep). This is basically what my implementation is doing.
If you are also interested in printing the backtrace, i.e. get some useful debugging information (function name, source code filename, source code line number, ...), read here about an extended backtrace_symbols
based on libbfd. Or just see the source here.
Signal Handling with the help of backtrace can solve your purpose.
I mean if you have a PID of the Thread, you can raise a signal for that thread. and in the handler you can use the backtrace. since the handler would be executing in that partucular thread, the backtrace there would be the output what you are needed.
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