oxidecomputer / oxidecomputer/omicron

want DWARF information for production binaries

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Debugging
Dominant language
Rust
Stars
572
Forks
97
Avg merge
2d 12h
Merged PRs (30d)
96

Description

In investigating some issues on rack2, I found that the propolis-server binary did not have useful DWARF information in it (oxidecomputer/propolis#477). While we have a lot of ways we can improve post-mortem debugging of our services written in rust, as our support there evolves, it is possible we will want to debug old core files, and it seems important to figure this out now, even if debugging cores from our services is more challenging than we hope now.

This is a non-trivial effort, I think, as there a lot of questions here to go figure out. Some wrinkles:

  • It's possible we don't want to do this for all binaries shipped in the product
  • Shipping DWARF information in the binary makes the binary bigger, which is a consideration for things in the ramdisk (like propolis-server and sled-agent)
  • We could also ship DWARF information separately. Where would that be stored?

There's a bigger question of how we get corefiles in a pipeline out for support etc, but those are orthogonal pieces of work to what I am imagining here.

Contributor guide

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First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Start by reviewing oxidecomputer/propolis#477 and the production build paths for propolis-server and sled-agent. Determine which shipped binaries need DWARF, whether it belongs in the binaries or separate artifacts, where separate information would be stored, and how size affects ramdisk components. Done means those choices are documented and an implementation plan is agreed.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
rust
Domain
build-system
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Needs clarification
Newbie friendliness
25/100

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