Stack Tracing, Simplified: The SFrame Story

Fast and precise stack tracing is crucial for most profiling and debugging needs, but the current available methods often come with complexity and overhead. This talk is about SFrame, the Simple Frame stack trace format, an approach designed for fast, precise, and low-overhead stack tracing.

SFrame is similar to the ORC format used in the Linux kernel, but generalized to userspace. SFrame tracks minimal necessary information for stack tracing; This directly translates to stack tracers that are both simple to implement and low complexity. This paves the way for more efficient tracing and debugging in production environments. We will also talk about SFrame’s technical maturation, detailing how its specification is being refined to address critical requirements related to alignment, size, and overall expressiveness, especially in the context of its proposed integration into glibc and the Linux kernel.