Reliable user-space stack traces with SFrame

DWARF is indeed incredibly complex. It is basically a turing complete stack machine that can run arbitrary computations. It has to be able to do this to be able to reverse arbitrary compiler optimizations for debugging. For a trivial example, while your code may declare a pointer, the compiler might actually store it as an offset from another pointer instead. In that case some simple addition will do, but this gets a lot more complicated when you stack layers of optimizations, computations that end up being eliminated due to inlining, VLAs, varargs, etc. Answering what the value of a variable is accurately might require substantial emulation of your code.

I don't know how much of this is needed to only do unwinding, but the idea of DWARF in the kernel is a very spooky prospect to me.