Zstd Compressed Debug Sections | Hacker News Reader

Zstd Compressed Debug Sections

maskray.me

23 pointsingve4 comments

Semi-related, the kernel now supports zstd-compressed kernel modules. I think (only?) OpenSUSE is using them at the moment.

on up-to-date archlinux:

  $ find /lib/modules/`uname -r` -name \*.ko.\* | sed s/.*\\.// | sort | uniq -c
        3 xz
     5721 zst

(the xzs apparently come from virtualbox)

I get that compressed .debug sections are nice for users who would generate the occasional stack trace, but if you are a developer of eg. a qt-based app with tons of dependencies and lots of plugins (meaning lots of addt'l calls to dlopen after the elf interpreter is done) I find it's actually harmful because it slows down gdb.

NVMe and lots of ram (for caching) are your friends.

I think unfortunately that battle is already lost. If you try running gdb on a modern Linux system it will attempt to download the debug sections it needs from a remote server, which is very very slow :-(

Reply on news.ycombinator.com