Discussion at Linux Foundation Japan Symposium

[Jun Koi]

On Thu, Dec 18, 2008 at 6:27 PM, KOSAKI Motohiro
<kosaki.motohiro@jp.fujitsu.com> wrote:
>> > (3) Make no debuginfo version
>> >
>> > Systemtap always requires kernel debuginfo to use.
>> > Unfortunately, it is hard for users of some distributions
>> > to have debuginfo.
>> >
>>
>> How is it possible to do that without kernel debug info? Currently
>> systemtap extracts lots of information on kernel layout from debug
>> info, so I dont understand why we can survive without that.
>
> At least, dtrace don't need debuginfo.
> On Solaris 10, kernel and all executable binary have own tracing purpose
> information in special elf section.
> it can't be stripped and gurantee exist although product application binary.
>
> http://blogs.sun.com/ali/entry/what_is_sunw_ldynsym
>
>
> Of cource, this approach indicate systemtap lost some feature.
> (e.g. above section don't have line number information and local
>  variable name information)
>
> but it is still useful for average tracing user.

So the way is to include, by default, debug information we need into
kernel binary? Yes, that solves the problem, provided that they
(kernel developers) accept that.

Thanks,
Jun