OProfile can also provide statistical samples of call chains (on x86). To do this, at sample time, the frame pointer chain is traversed, recording the return address for each stack frame. This will only work if the code was compiled with frame pointers, but we're careful to abort the traversal if the frame pointer appears bad. We store the set of return addresses straight into the CPU buffer. Note that, since this traversal is keyed off the standard sample interrupt, the number of times a function appears in a stack trace is not an indicator of how many times the call site was executed: rather, it's related to the number of samples we took where that call site was involved. Thus, the results for stack traces are not necessarily proportional to the call counts: typical programs will have many main() samples.