Good news... Jan Beulich of Novell has posted a 3-part patch for introducing reliable back tracing (from within the kernel) for x86_64 and x86: [PATCH 1/3] reliable stack trace support http://www.uwsg.indiana.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0605.2/0102.html It looks very much like the ia64 implementation, but done much more generically. Unfortunately, at least the x86_64 version doesn't cross the interrupt stack to process stack boundary. He doesn't mention about transitioning from the x86_64 exception stacks to the process or interrupt stacks, but I'm presuming that wouldn't work either. And I would presume that x86 stack transitions also would not work, since AFAICT the code that would make the stack transitions would be in the generic code section. Anyway, this is very promising for the future. Not only may we be able to supplement the crash utility's low-budget x86_64 backtracer, but perhaps even the heavily-patched LKCD-based x86 version as well. Dave