Ubuntu 24.04 LTS To Enable Frame Pointers By Default For Better Profiling/Debugging

Canonical has decided for Ubuntu 24.04 LTS that they will now enable frame pointers by default when building packages. There will still selectively be some packages where they decide to disable frame pointers due to the performance overhead, but the focus on this change is to improve the out-of-the-box debugging and profiling support on the Linux distribution.

Following Fedora deciding to enable frame pointers by default for their package builds to help debugging and profiling with the stock packages, Ubuntu Linux is now going to be doing the same.

Ubuntu will be enabling frame pointers by default for all 64-bit platforms with Ubuntu 24.04. In cases of performance overhead being too great, for select packages they will still omit the frame pointers.

There is a small performance penalty associated with the change, but in cases where the impact is high (such as the Python interpreter), we’ll continue to omit frame pointers until this is addressed. Our analysis suggests that the penalty on 64-bit architectures is between 1-2% in most cases. We will not make this change on 32-bit architectures where the penalty is higher.

Enabling such trivial access to performance insights, combined with a commitment to investing in the performance of the platform from Canonical, will facilitate global performance improvements for Ubuntu and the workloads it supports.

This change and rebuilding all Ubuntu 24.04 packages is expected to happen over the coming weeks.

This news comes just one day after Canonical announced they are exploring x86-64-v3 micro-architecture feature level build of Ubuntu Linux moving forward.

I'm told this is part of a broader effort by Canonical with ramping up their efforts for focusing on Ubuntu Linux performance. It will be great to see all what they manage for Ubuntu 24.04 LTS and of course I'll be by with benchmarks ahead.