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Re: [Ksummit-2008-discuss] DTrace
- From: James Bottomley <James dot Bottomley at HansenPartnership dot com>
- To: Theodore Tso <tytso at mit dot edu>
- Cc: "Frank Ch. Eigler" <fche at redhat dot com>, ksummit-2008-discuss at lists dot linux-foundation dot org, systemtap at sources dot redhat dot com
- Date: Mon, 30 Jun 2008 15:24:49 -0500
- Subject: Re: [Ksummit-2008-discuss] DTrace
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On Mon, 2008-06-30 at 16:10 -0400, Theodore Tso wrote:
> Stupid question --- has anyone thought about writing tools to strip
> out specific debug information not needed by Systemtap? For example,
> I assume systemtap doesn't need the line number information, since you
> can't set probes on arbitrary line numbers (and even if you could,
> such tapsets would be so brittle that it wouldn't be funny); so would
> the debuginfo files be smaller if that information were stripped out?
> I understand that this would make the files less useful for
> kdump/crash, but for systemtap only users, it might be quite useful.
> What about stripping out the text segment of the object files, so you
> aren't storing the information twice on disk, or compressing the
> debuginfo files so they take up less room on disk?
Actually, you can ... and I know it's brittle, but I do use this feature
a lot (there's no other way to get at local variables currently than by
specifying a line number through the statement interface). I believe
the point of the markers project is to add pieces to the kernel that
identify useful (and invariant) internal points in the routines where
you can get at the local variables without having to specify line
numbers.
The debug information is bulky because dwarf is so damn wasteful.
Practically every kernel module will contain the dwarf definition of
certain central structures. When a debugger works on an executable, it
first of all builds up and in house view of all the dwarf statements,
combining all of the duplicate symbols. If we could find a way of doing
that for the kernel and then spitting it out as a single file, it would
be far smaller than the debuginfo. Assuming we don't want a monolith,
but actual reduced files (so that modules can be added) we immediately
run across the other annoying thing with dwarf: it has a mechanism to
stub out definitions (DW_AT_declaration) but no way of providing input
about where the real definition is (you now have to search the entire
tree to find it).
Unfortunately, you really have to do these type of reduction tricks, and
strip really just won't do them usefully.
James