Debuggers, Profilers, and Production Introspection: DWARF Unwinding, Breakpoint Traps, ptrace, Hardware Performance Counters (PEBS/IBS), USDT Probes, and Continuous Profiling

Deep End Era. Engineering with Sankalp · Oct 29, 2026 · 1h 13m

How does GDB pause a running program at line 42 when your source code was compiled into raw machine bytes? How does a profiler unwind a 40-frame call stack when the compiler omitted frame pointers (RBP)? And why do out-of-order CPUs blame the wrong instruction for a cache miss unless you use Intel PEBS or AMD IBS? We go inside 0xCC (INT 3), ptrace, DWARF .ehframe unwinding, rr time-travel debugging, PEBS/IBS, USDT probes, and eBPF continuous profiling.

Chapters

00:00:00 Opening: The Impossible Production Bug at Two in the Morning

00:04:06 How a DebuggerActually Pauses Your Code: hexadecimal…