HEADS UP: Standalone kernel debug files moving out of /boot/kernel/

[Kevin Oberman]

On Tue, Oct 28, 2014 at 5:20 PM, Ed Maste <emaste at freebsd.org> wrote:

> I am preparing to move the standalone kernel debug data out of
> /boot/kernel/ into /usr/lib/debug/boot/kernel/, mirroring the approach
> used for userland debug data. This significantly reduces the boot
> partition size requirement, and is a step towards supporting the
> installation of kernel debug data ony when required. LLDB and GDB
> automatically search for debug data under /usr/lib/debug/ so this
> change should be transparent from an end-user perspective.
>
> The change can be reviewed in Phabricator at
> https://reviews.freebsd.org/D1006 and can be fetched as a unified diff
> from https://people.freebsd.org/~emaste/patches/D1006.diff
>
> This does not change any defaults or knobs: kernel debug files are
> still built by default, and may be disabled by setting
> WITHOUT_KERNEL_SYMBOLS=YES in /etc/src.conf. I hope to rationalize
> this with userland debug in a later step.
>
> Note that the change renames the intermediate and debug data files to
> be consistent with userland debug data: in the build directory the
> kernel with debug data included is now named kernel.full, and and
> kernel.debug is the standalone debug data file.
>
> I plan to merge this in a few days if there are no issues reported in
> further review or testing.
>
> -Ed
>

Finally! This is great news.

/usr/lib seems like an odd place, though. Does not seem to match the
description in hier(7) (not that the man page can't be updated). Looks to
me like it fits /var a bit better, though I'm not sure that much data is
appropriate for many /var partitions.

Still, wherever the symbol files end up, getting them out of root is
something many people have wanted for a long time.
--
R. Kevin Oberman, Network Engineer, Retired
E-mail: rkoberman at gmail.com