What do people think about not installing a stripped /kernel ?

[Andrew Atrens]

Hi Matt,

I'm compiling my kernel with -gstabs, and I wouldn't mind installing it as
non-stripped, but I'm constantly running out of memory on my / partition
(set up as 256M), mostly because of the modules all getting built with 
-gstabs as well. From my perspective it would be a lot more useful to not
have debug info in all of the modules and have a full-on debuggable kernel.

Actually, to be honest I'm not sure what the procedure is to make gdb aware
of loaded modules. So, when I was having a bunch of ndis related panics, I
could guess that parts of the tracebacks were in ndis or if_ndis because
some funcs had no symbolic info. But I suppose at that point all I could do
was perhaps some objdumps on the modules, try to guess where they were
getting loaded into ram, and then extrapolate that info to figure out what
those non-symbol functions were ...

So yeah I'm all for a debuggable kernel, but I'd also like to see modules
installed without debug info by default.

Andrew.


Matthew Dillon wrote:

>     The only cost is disk space... e.g. 3MB stripped kernel verses 16MB
>     debug kernel.  But the debug info isn't actually loaded into memory so
>     the kernel load time and memory overhead is the same as with the
>     stripped version.
> 
>     The issue is bug reports and kernel core dumps.  I can't count the
>     number of times I have had to carefully instruct people to retrieve
>     their
>     kernel.debug's for bug reporting purposes.  And even my own debugging
>     would be more convenient if I didn't have to save off a separate copy
>     of the debug version of the kernel.
> 
>     What I'm thinking of doing is having the installkernel target install
>     the debug version rather then the stripped version unless told to
>     install the stripped version with a new option, e.g. 'options
>     INSTALL_STRIPPED'. We would ship full debug GENERIC kernels instead of
>     stripped kernels. i.e. we aren't getting rid of the ability to install
>     a stripped kernel, we just aren't making it the default any more.
> 
>     What do people think?
> 
> -Matt