Date: Wed, 27 Feb 2008 21:07:32 +0100 From: Kris Kennaway <kris@FreeBSD.org> To: Bruce Cran <bruce@cran.org.uk> Cc: Maxim Khitrov <mkhitrov@gmail.com>, Freebsd questions <freebsd-questions@freebsd.org> Subject: Re: FreeBSD 7.0 Message-ID: <47C5C304.40400@FreeBSD.org> In-Reply-To: <47C5A890.6070401@cran.org.uk> References: <724581.33334.qm@web30807.mail.mud.yahoo.com> <47C5571C.5090207@FreeBSD.org> <39DC135F7F0571489196E0B6F5D58B4A05DDB404@MWBEXCH.mweb.com> <47C56C52.2090804@FreeBSD.org> <26ddd1750802270827x21eab37du3443b7a25c6ab6eb@mail.gmail.com> <47C5A890.6070401@cran.org.uk>
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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
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