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Date: Wed, 27 Feb 2008 21:07:32 +0100
From: Kris Kennaway <kris@FreeBSD.org>
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Cc: Maxim Khitrov <mkhitrov@gmail.com>,
	Freebsd questions <freebsd-questions@freebsd.org>
Subject: Re: FreeBSD 7.0
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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