Re: [Ksummit-2008-discuss] DTrace

[Roland McGrath <roland@redhat.com>]

Like I said, the essential command is eu-strip -f.  It is simple to use.

For one's own local hacking purposes, there is no real reason to bother
with strip-to-file complexities.  You can just copy the unstripped files
before stripping them.  The effect is the same (or easier for you, with
most of the tools), and the extra 6M (stripped) where you have disk space
for the 60M (debuginfo) is never an issue (i.e. if it's 66M unstripped).

In the Fedora packaging, an ELF vmlinux file in /boot is treated the same
as the .ko files (and all installed binaries for any package) and gets the
strip-to-file treatment.  It works the same on ELF executables (be they
kernels or otherwise), DSOs, and .ko's.  There is a special case in the
kernel packaging when what's in /boot is not in ELF format (i.e. bzImage
format and such)--the strip-to-file convention requires having the stripped
ELF file intact and on hand too.  When there won't be any plain ELF vmlinux
in /boot, we just copy the unstripped vmlinux into /usr/src/debug.

I honestly don't think it's ever going to be useful to any distro build to
have kernel makefiles do .debug file splitting.  For purposes of separate
debuginfo, the kernel really isn't a very special package.  The distro
packaging magic needs to do its debuginfo diddling, strip-to-file, and
related cataloguing magic for all packages anyway.  All the packagers have
to do for each individual package is get it to compile with -g and not
strip the binaries it installs.  The packaging hooey takes care of the
rest, and having a package's "make install" try to "do it for you" would
just break everything.  Future distro magic will evolve with newer tools to
pack the .debug file data in different, better ways, etc.  It just is not
going to help packagers to have any version of such logic built into the
kernel build process.

That said, knock yourself out.  I'm glad to answer questions about the
tools.  But we have gone pretty darn far afield from this thread's topic
now.  This does not seem like the logical place to pursue those technical
details of the toolchain.


Thanks,
Roland