libunwind

libunwind

libunwind is a portable and efficient C API for determining the current call chain of ELF program threads of execution and for resuming execution at any point in that call chain. The API supports both local (same process) and remote (other process) operation.

The API is useful in a number of applications, including but not limited to the following.

• program introspection Either for error messages showing a back trace of the call chain leading to a problem or for performance monitoring and analysis.
• debugging Whether the debugging and analysis of the call chain of a remote program or the post-mortem analysis of a coredump.
• language runtime exception handling libunwind optionally provides an alternative implementation of the Itanium exception handling ABI used by many popular toolchains.
• alternative setjmp()/longjmp() libunwind optionally provides an alternative implementation of the setjmp()/longjmp() functionality of the C standard library.

Supported Systems

This library supports several architecture/operating-system combinations:

General Build Instructions

This library uses Meson as its build system. It can be built and installed with the following commands:

$ meson setup build --prefix=PREFIX
$ meson compile -C build
$ meson install -C build

where PREFIX is the installation prefix. By default, a prefix of /usr/local is used, such that libunwind.a is installed in /usr/local/lib and unwind.h is installed in /usr/local/include.

Autotools (deprecated)

An Autotools build is still provided, but is deprecated and planned for removal in a future release. New usage should build with Meson instead.

$ autoreconf -i # Needed only for building from git. Depends on libtool.
$ ./configure --prefix=PREFIX
$ make
$ make install

Regression Testing

After building the library, you can run a set of regression tests with:

$ meson test -C build

With Autotools, use make check instead.

Performance Testing

This distribution includes a few simple performance tests which give some idea of the basic cost of various libunwind operations. After building the library, you can run these tests with the following command:

$ meson test -C build --benchmark

With Autotools, run make perf from the tests directory instead.

Contacting the Developers

Please raise issues and pull requests through the GitHub repository: .