
A new version of
kernel-package
in Incoming at the
time of writing adds support for creating a package which contains
the Linux kernel debug image. This means the debugging information
for the modules in the kernel image package, and the uncompressed
vmlinux image. This builds on suggestions and code from Troy Heber,
Theodore Y. Ts o, and Dann Frazier.
As support for kexec/kdump support becomes more real, it will be
very useful to be able to build kernels that have debugging
information available, but not necessarily to install the debugging
information on every single client system.
The
.ko
object files are stripped of the debugging
information before they are placed in the standard
linux-image installation package. However, before that, a
copy of the vmlinux and unstripped
.ko
files are saved
in a debuginfo package, and everything except for the
debugging information is removed from them using
objcopy
--keep-only-debug
. This means that if someone ends up with a
crash dump, they can send it to a support engineer and only the
support engineer needs to install the debuginfo package and use the
crash utility to debug the crash dump. It s also useful
for developers, since the debuginfo information can be stored
somewhere outside of
/lib
for storing its debug
information, for example. This is useful for keeping the size of
the root partition small, for those who keep
/
separate from
/usr
.
The locations used are compatible also with SystemTap,
which provides free software infrastructure to simplify the
gathering of information about the running Linux system. This
assists diagnosis of a performance or functional problem.
SystemTap eliminates the need for the developer to go
through the tedious and disruptive instrument, recompile, install,
and reboot sequence that may be otherwise required to collect
data.
Also, I had to clear out some FUD about kernel-package from the
ircbot dpkg on the OFTC Debian IRC channel, since
someone had implied that
kernel-package
was some how
obsolete. As can be seen, it is being actively developed, and
features are being added apace.