All for a pointless waste of a register for something that will only be useful the <1% of the time the code is actually run. That may be true, but having prope

All for a pointless waste of a register for something that will only be useful the <1% of the time the code is actually run. That may be true, but having proper stack traces will probably cumulate to optimizations that gain much more than the 1% loss of enabling frame pointers [1]. Ideally, it would be much easier to rebuild whole Linux systems. Then people who need it could enable frame pointers. Sadly, rebuilding a mainstream Linux distribution is much harder than rebuilding e.g. Gentoo or NixOS. Though, in practice even rebuilding a NixOS system is fraught with issues. I have done large rebuilds, but it would often fail because e.g. unit tests have issues that only manifest themselves with enough build parallelism. [1] Note that on x86_32, the performance improvement was larger due to register pressure.