FreeBSD 7.0
Kris Kennaway
kris at FreeBSD.org
Wed Feb 27 20:07:38 UTC 2008
Bruce Cran wrote:
>> Just curious - is there a reason why the generic kernel is still being
>> built with debug symbols? I thought that was only used during the
>> pre-release phase.
>>
>
> WITNESS and INVARIANTS are enabled before the pre-release phase (i.e
> before -BETA)
> - as far as I know debug symbols are always generated by default, and
> are dumped into /boot/kernel
> as separate files. They don't hurt performance (unlike witness and
> invariants) and are useful in a
> few situations, one of which is if you ever get a panic.
Just so. If there are no debug symbols present then users who manage to
cause a panic cannot obtain the backtrace that is required to analyse
the bug report. Before we made debugging symbols installed by default
we had to toss out a lot of otherwise valuable bug reports because
sufficient information could not be obtained after the fact.
Kris
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