In IDA, I can see what calls a specific function by looking at the xrefs to it, or by looking 1 step back on stack trace.
What are the differences between them?
How does IDA know what the stack trace is? And how does IDA know what the xrefs to a specific function are?
x-refs is just a static cross-reference in the binary that can be identified during static-analysis.
So if you main call funcA you could tell that by looking at x-refs on funcA. But you can't be sure that it will be in fact called during runtime - there might be some conditional jumps that only call funcA in a certain state.
Stacktrace presents the actual calls at a given point so it's dynamic and might change after another instruction execution.
Stack trace information is gathered by looking at EBP on the stack ref. x-refs are done by analyzing the binary.
