Why does eclipse debugger only show 1 or 2 lines of the stack followed by 0x0?

Question

On Linux I get nice, healthy, full stack traces. On Windows, however, when something crashes (like a segfault violation), I only get the top one or two lines of the stack, followed by the entry 0x0 (which I cannot expand). This makes it very hard to debug

Answer 1

Probably you should start using WinDBG to debug your program instead of IDE like eclipse. This is very powerful command line tool and its functionality is very similar to GDB.

On Windows, "UnhandledExceptionFilter" function is called when no exception handler is defined to handle the exception that is raised. The function typically passes the exception up to the Ntdll.dll file, which catches and tries to handle it. EXCEPTION_POINTERS structure does contains the most useful information about what is the exception and where it has occurred which gets passed as one of the parameter of the above function. This information would be used by .exr and .cxr command in WinDBG to get the complete stack trace.

typedef struct _EXCEPTION_POINTERS {
  PEXCEPTION_RECORD ExceptionRecord;
  PCONTEXT          ContextRecord;
} EXCEPTION_POINTERS, *PEXCEPTION_POINTERS;

ExceptionRecord A pointer to an EXCEPTION_RECORD structure that contains a machine-independent description of the exception.

ContextRecord A pointer to a CONTEXT structure that contains a processor-specific description of the state of the processor at the time of the exception.

For complete steps about how to get the complete back trace and analysis from the dump file(like GDB)or debug session, you may want to read and follow the steps mentioned in the following link:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/313109