this is a fairly common trick which is used for all sorts of things: getting around licensing, tracing system calls, error checking and garbage collection. it's unfortunate that the authors didn't look to see how it could be implemented on a few more systems - it's considerably more difficult to find stack frame information on other systems; they could also have explored ways of making the run time loader load their stuff first on other platforms too. this is slightly too linux specific, and linux is a bad example since libc is publicly available.
the same trick is used in many commercially available error checking tools, e.g. purify & the like.
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this is a fairly common trick which is used for all sorts of things: getting around licensing, tracing system calls, error checking and garbage collection. it's unfortunate that the authors didn't look to see how it could be implemented on a few more systems - it's considerably more difficult to find stack frame information on other systems; they could also have explored ways of making the run time loader load their stuff first on other platforms too. this is slightly too linux specific, and linux is a bad example since libc is publicly available. the same trick is used in many commercially available error checking tools, e.g. purify & the like.