Re: [RFC] kallsyms: embed source file:line info in kernel stack traces

Sasha Levin <[email protected]> Tue, 3 Mar 2026 11:35:26 -0500
Newsgroups dev.linux.lists.ksummit
Message-ID <aacNzgFsnpGvG4I0@laps>
On Tue, Mar 03, 2026 at 08:17:48AM -0500, Steven Rostedt wrote:
>On Tue, 3 Mar 2026 08:39:36 +0300
>Alexey Dobriyan <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>> On Mon, Mar 02, 2026 at 03:28:28PM -0500, Sasha Levin wrote:
>> >   [   11.206749]  dump_stack_lvl+0x5d/0x80 (lib/dump_stack.c:94)
>>
>> This is super useful, thanks.
>>
>> Can the 0x prefix be dropped as well?
>
>And print in decimal? Without the 0x, it could be ambiguous that it's hex.
>
>> It is shorter to print in decimal up to 1 million.
>>
>> () are just character noise, I'd drop them
>
>I actually prefer them ;-)
>
>Anyway, this looks more like a feature that is for us kernel developers
>debugging our own kernels than something that should be added to a distro.
>decode_stacktrace.pl can be used for those because distro kernels always
>supply debug data that can be downloaded at any time.

You know, that's what I thought when I was writing that little "bug bot" you
saw yesterday: if I just construct the right prompts for each distro, the LLM
can go ahead and fetch debug symbols and translate those call traces for us.
What I've learned (and I might be mistaken, so corrections welcome!) is:

  - Debian is pretty good at it, but they don't store debug symbols for the
    security archive. As an example, my build machine is currently running
6.17.13+deb14-amd64, and for the life of me I can't dig up the debug symbols
even manually.

  - Fedora only provides the latest kernel. We can fish the older ones from
    Koji, but it's quite hard nailing down the correct ones.

  - Arch simply doesn't provide debug symbols.

  - Tumbleweed provides only 30 days of archives.

  - Gentoo (binary packages) doesn't provide them at all (though is planning to).

  - Ubuntu provides them for the lifetime of the release, but their forums are
    full of reports of missing symbols and server issues.

  - Rocky is similar to ubuntu
    (https://forums.rockylinux.org/t/rocky-9-4-still-missing-kernel-debuginfo-common/15169
for example).

-- 
Thanks,
Sasha