22 January 2008
When firefox crashes and burns…
Posted by Christopher under: Linux & Open Source .
One of the main fedora bug reporters (these people are like gold - they actually report problems and document them pretty well) recently CC’d me in on a firefox bug. Running it through gdb I got the following ridiculously unhelpful bunch of errors:
warning: Missing the separate debug info file: /usr/lib/debug/.build-id/3b/fcf3e37731d5058d14badc687008e09c95cb1b.debug
warning: Missing the separate debug info file: /usr/lib/debug/.build-id/de/0ca77c03cd1166b5a2d34920ec10b1a6fb7a0f.debug
warning: Missing the separate debug info file: /usr/lib/debug/.build-id/ed/528e880f58d0466b0984f63be465b67e4dddaa.debug
Ahhh, _those_ debug info files. Long and the short of it, here’s the resolution (on Fedora or EL >= 5):
# yum install yum-utils
# debuginfo-install firefox (or $WHATEVER_APP_YOU_ARE_DEBUGGING)
… this may take a while @ circa 200MB d/l
$ gdb firefox (or, due to the way it runs in Fedora, /usr/lib/firefox-2.0.0.10/firefox-bin)
and you’re away…
2 Comments so far...
Daniel Boulet Says:
25 January 2008 at 12:19 AM.
I understand that this is not ‘your problem’. On the other hand, you seem to know something about it so here goes.
Let’s see if I got this right. I have to run debuginfo-install against each app that I intend to debug using gdb? Is that right? Maybe I just have to run it once against an app that I’ll be debugging and the magic gets done and I don’t have to worry about it again. Please tell me it is something like that ‘cuz if I have to run it against each app that I intend to debug then I sure hope that this is a ‘feature’ that will be removed in the next release!
-Danny
Christopher Says:
25 January 2008 at 12:53 AM.
Good news Daniel. Well, sort of. Yes, yum will depsolve all/most of the required apps. So when you run:
# debuginfo-install firefox
it will grab all/most of the packages you need to debug with gdb. However it seems to miss a few out. In this instance then you are left to run:
# yum install /usr/lib/debug/.build-id/ed/528e880f58d0466b0984f63be465b67e4dddaa.debug –enablerepo=fedora-debuginfo,updates-debuginfo
and so on for the ones that gdb still complains about.
However I need it for getting stack traces or some such for developers which is why I blogged about it here. This has always been the case by the way - debugging symbols get stripped during the build as to turn these on would decrease performance, increase disk space, blah, blah, blah.
It simply that the method of accessing debuginfo rpms is not well documented.
Read more about it here:
https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2008-January/msg00300.html
