2009/12/7 Jeff Mahoney
Is including symbolics a performance hit, or just a disk space issue?
It's a disk space issue. The symbol tables are in a different ELF section and don't actually get loaded at runtime. The thing is that it is a *huge* disk space issue. The kernel packages, for example, grow to over 1 GB in size if they include debuginfo. I do a lot of testing without building RPMs and I have to remember to strip the debuginfo when installing the modules or I very quickly run out of disk space on my root filesystem.
I haven't ever actually tried it, but it should be possible to translate the backtrace on a different machine, if the matching debuginfo is available. The down side is that you don't end up getting symbolic information for things in the stack frame (like current variables).
Thanks! Perhaps the guy who hacked up compressed kernel modules to save disk, could come out with a "Thin Elf" format, where all that stuff is decompressed on demand on the fly if it's actually needed. *joking but...* -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-factory+help@opensuse.org