Commit 10e68b02 authored May 26, 2020 by Nick Desaulniers Committed by Masahiro Yamada May 29, 2020

Makefile: support compressed debug info



As debug information gets larger and larger, it helps significantly save
the size of vmlinux images to compress the information in the debug
information sections. Note: this debug info is typically split off from
the final compressed kernel image, which is why vmlinux is what's used
in conjunction with GDB. Minimizing the debug info size should have no
impact on boot times, or final compressed kernel image size.

All of the debug sections will have a `C` flag set.
$ readelf -S <object file>

$ bloaty vmlinux.gcc75.compressed.dwarf4 -- \
    vmlinux.gcc75.uncompressed.dwarf4

    FILE SIZE        VM SIZE
 --------------  --------------
  +0.0%     +18  [ = ]       0    [Unmapped]
 -73.3%  -114Ki  [ = ]       0    .debug_aranges
 -76.2% -2.01Mi  [ = ]       0    .debug_frame
 -73.6% -2.89Mi  [ = ]       0    .debug_str
 -80.7% -4.66Mi  [ = ]       0    .debug_abbrev
 -82.9% -4.88Mi  [ = ]       0    .debug_ranges
 -70.5% -9.04Mi  [ = ]       0    .debug_line
 -79.3% -10.9Mi  [ = ]       0    .debug_loc
 -39.5% -88.6Mi  [ = ]       0    .debug_info
 -18.2%  -123Mi  [ = ]       0    TOTAL

$ bloaty vmlinux.clang11.compressed.dwarf4 -- \
    vmlinux.clang11.uncompressed.dwarf4

    FILE SIZE        VM SIZE
 --------------  --------------
  +0.0%     +23  [ = ]       0    [Unmapped]
 -65.6%    -871  [ = ]       0    .debug_aranges
 -77.4% -1.84Mi  [ = ]       0    .debug_frame
 -82.9% -2.33Mi  [ = ]       0    .debug_abbrev
 -73.1% -2.43Mi  [ = ]       0    .debug_str
 -84.8% -3.07Mi  [ = ]       0    .debug_ranges
 -65.9% -8.62Mi  [ = ]       0    .debug_line
 -86.2% -40.0Mi  [ = ]       0    .debug_loc
 -42.0% -64.1Mi  [ = ]       0    .debug_info
 -22.1%  -122Mi  [ = ]       0    TOTAL

For x86_64 defconfig + LLVM=1 (before):
Elapsed (wall clock) time (h:mm:ss or m:ss): 3:22.03
Maximum resident set size (kbytes): 43856

For x86_64 defconfig + LLVM=1 (after):
Elapsed (wall clock) time (h:mm:ss or m:ss): 3:32.52
Maximum resident set size (kbytes): 1566776

Thanks to:
Nick Clifton helped us to provide the minimal binutils version.
Sedat Dilek found an increase in size of debug .deb package.

Cc: Nick Clifton <nickc@redhat.com>
Suggested-by: David Blaikie <blaikie@google.com>
Reviewed-by: Fangrui Song <maskray@google.com>
Tested-by: Sedat Dilek <sedat.dilek@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Nick Desaulniers <ndesaulniers@google.com>
Signed-off-by: Masahiro Yamada <masahiroy@kernel.org>

parent 565587d8

Makefile

+6 −0

Original line number	Diff line number	Diff line
		@@ -825,6 +825,12 @@ DEBUG_CFLAGS += $(call cc-option, -femit-struct-debug-baseonly) \
		$(call cc-option,-fno-var-tracking)
		endif

		ifdef CONFIG_DEBUG_INFO_COMPRESSED
		DEBUG_CFLAGS += -gz=zlib
		KBUILD_AFLAGS += -Wa,--compress-debug-sections=zlib
		KBUILD_LDFLAGS += --compress-debug-sections=zlib
		endif

		KBUILD_CFLAGS += $(DEBUG_CFLAGS)
		export DEBUG_CFLAGS

lib/Kconfig.debug

+17 −0

Original line number	Diff line number	Diff line
		@@ -213,6 +213,23 @@ config DEBUG_INFO_REDUCED
		DEBUG_INFO build and compile times are reduced too.
		Only works with newer gcc versions.

		config DEBUG_INFO_COMPRESSED
		bool "Compressed debugging information"
		depends on DEBUG_INFO
		depends on $(cc-option,-gz=zlib)
		depends on $(as-option,-Wa$(comma)--compress-debug-sections=zlib)
		depends on $(ld-option,--compress-debug-sections=zlib)
		help
		Compress the debug information using zlib. Requires GCC 5.0+ or Clang
		5.0+, binutils 2.26+, and zlib.

		Users of dpkg-deb via scripts/package/builddeb may find an increase in
		size of their debug .deb packages with this config set, due to the
		debug info being compressed with zlib, then the object files being
		recompressed with a different compression scheme. But this is still
		preferable to setting $KDEB_COMPRESS to "none" which would be even
		larger.

		config DEBUG_INFO_SPLIT
		bool "Produce split debuginfo in .dwo files"
		depends on DEBUG_INFO

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