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

[O'Connor, Daniel]

On 30 Oct 2014, at 13:23, Steven Hartland <killing at multiplay.co.uk> wrote:
> Making things harder to manage vs saving a little bit of space on the 
> root partition really doesn't sound like a good idea; especially when 
> with the ZFS install, which I would suggest is becoming the norm, the 
> root partition doesn't suffer from space issues anyway.

Note that it’s not “a little bit” of space.
[freebsd10 8:21] /boot/kernel >ll kernel *.ko| awk '{i += $5} END {print $5}'
49312
[freebsd10 8:21] /boot/kernel >ll *.symbols | awk '{i += $5} END {print $5}’
212464

i.e. the debug information is more than 4x larger than the code its for (!).

I agree managing the symbol files does become significantly more difficult in this case but the patch makes quite a substantial difference to the number of kernels you can keep in / (especially on older installs which have <1GB roots).

Perhaps there could be a flag to disable it just for the kernel that could be put into /etc/make.conf? That way it’s set and forget if you are kernel juggling.

Regards,
	Daniel O’Connor

Senior Software Engineer
Isilon Platforms Team