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

Sasha Levin
2026-03-03T16:35:28Z

On Tue, Mar 03, 2026 at 08:17:48AM -0500, Steven Rostedt wrote:
>On Tue, 3 Mar 2026 08:39:36 +0300
>Alexey Dobriyan <adobriyan@gmail.com> 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