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Hardware Breakpoints

Many architectures provide hardware assisted debugging in some fashion. If the support comes in the form of hardware breakpoints, and the breakpoints can be placed on memory accesses (aka watchpoints) instead of instruction addresses, the kernel may be able to load a breakpoint on the address where the next and last return pointers are stored before context switching into a processes. Access to the current function's return pointer and the next function's in the calling sequence would both cause a trap into the kernel. A deeper function call will cause a trap which must add a breakpoint to the next return pointer location when it saves the current. A return will cause a trap which must confirm that there is a breakpoint on the next previous return pointer.

The use of hardware breakpoints to approximate the trap behavior of register windows requires knowledge of stack layout a priori or the userland process must include stack layout hints.



2001-05-12