Troubles with debug info, using systemtap on debian.

[James Y Knight]

On Nov 10, 2009, at 1:07 PM, Frank Ch. Eigler wrote:

> Eugeniy Meshcheryakov <eugen@debian.org> writes:
>
>> [...]
>>> 3) The debian kernel's debuginfo does "objcopy --only-keep-
>>> debug"...That seems like it shouldn't cause systemtap to blow up,
>>> but it does. I guess that's a known bug? [...]
>>> 5) Whose bug is it that systemtap doesn't look for
>>> /usr/lib/debug/.../autofs4.ko, but only autofs4.ko.debug?
>>> [...]
>
> The issue here is that elfutils looks for .ko.debug files, if the
> original .ko was stripped of debug data.  The fedora naming convention
> communicates the fact that the separated .ko.debug files are not
> .ko's, in that they lack executable .text/.data/etc. payload.
>
> Some distributions don't strip the debug data the same way as fedora,
> but instead preserve the original unstripped binaries under
> /usr/lib/debug or similar.  In this case, since the original files are
> complete, it makes sense not to rename them "anything.debug", but OTOH
> then elfutils must break the tie between that copy and an identically
> named stripped one.

Debian preserves only the debug info in /usr/lib/debug, with objcopy -- 
only-keep-debug. So, the files are generally not complete. But, they  
are named "anything", not "anything.debug".

James