Bug#365349: Add support for creating a "debuginfo" package

["Frank Ch. Eigler" <fche@redhat.com>]

Hi -

On Thu, Jul 16, 2009 at 09:21:50AM +0200, Bastian Blank wrote:
> [...]
> > THis would be ideal.  Current tools like "crash" don't work with an
> > image that's been stripped with "--only-keep-debug".  I'm not sure what
> > strip is removing that crash needs, but I'll look into it.
> 
> This will not work on x86 because the bootable image is no elf file.

However, the copying the vmlinux file into the debug data package
can serve that purpose.

> > Stripping the modules themselves with "--only-keep-debug" seems to work
> > with crash, but then it saves only a marginal amount of space (from 963
> > MB down to 926 MB on a 2.6.29 kernel).
> 
> Oh. What is the size of the resulting packages?

See https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging:Debuginfo for pointers
about how all this stuff works on fedoraish linuxes.  Here's some
uncompressed installation footprint size data for some random fedora
kernel build, including tons of modules (all with separated+preserved
debug data):

2066708 kernel-headers-2.6.26.6-49.fc8.x86_64
        (generated userspace headers, not related to present issue)
35544488 kernel-devel-2.6.26.6-49.fc8.x86_64
         (/lib/modules/.../build Makefiles, headers)
72738085 kernel-2.6.26.6-49.fc8.x86_64
         (vmlinuz, all MODULE.ko)
138071911 kernel-debuginfo-common-2.6.26.6-49.fc8.x86_64
         (kernel sources)
764427043 kernel-debuginfo-2.6.26.6-49.fc8.x86_64
         (vmlinux, all MODULE.ko.debug files)

- FChE