Debug information for shipped packages

SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 11
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11

A program is experiencing problems and needs to be debugged

Programs and libraries delivered as part of SLES or SLED are shipped with debug information removed. This means that when a program is loaded into a debugger, internal symbols are unknown, and internal functions are shown as question marks.

In SLE10, debug information was only provided for the kernel and glibc. Starting with SLE11, all debug information for binary packages is made available through the software channels. To gain access to it, start YaST and go to the "Software Repositories" module in the "Software" section. If the product has been registered, there will be two channels available: SLE11-Debuginfo-Pool and SLE11-Debuginfo-Updates. The -Pool channel contains debug information for all binary packages delivered with the product, and the -Updates channel contains debug information for all binary packages delivered as maintenance updates.

Each package has two debug information packages. One called -debuginfo and one called -debugsource. A debugger, such as gdb with the ddd frontend, is able to display values of symbols using the information from the -debuginfo package. With the -debugsource package it is additionally able to display the program's source code while debugging.

For example, since almost all programs use glibc in some capacity, it is almost always necessary to install the packages glibc-debuginfo and glibc-debugsource, in order to have usable output during a debugging session.

Please take care to use the exact same build version for the debug information packages as for the main package. Any difference between the two can lead to wildly misleading output from the debugger

The debug info is only needed on the machine where a problem is analysed. These packages are not needed simply to obtain an application core dump, for example. They are only needed to analyse it.

For this reason, customers with support contracts who want application crashes to be analysed by SUSE Technical Services do not have to install these debug packages, unless there is a desire to debug or analyse a problem locally.