Red Hat Talks Up debuginfod As The New Debug Info Web Server

Debuginfod is the new ELFUTILS HTTP web server for providing debug information or even source code on-demand to debuggers and related development utilities.

Debuginfod is the optional HTTP server that is part of the ELFUTILS package and is for distributing ELF/DWARF debugging information and program source code when requested based upon a build ID of what's being compiled/debugged. This Red Hat led initiative has already led to Debuginfod support added to the new Binutils 2.34 for being able to query source files and debug information when not present on the local file-system.

The developers hope organizations or even Linux distributions will host debuginfod servers to allow for their developers to query this information on-demand from centralized servers rather than carrying around extra debug bits on each system that can quickly accumulate in size.

So far debuginfod support is being wired up to various GNU toolchain components but the plan is on expanding that to also include the likes of LLVM tooling.

Red Hat's Mark Wielaard and Frank Eigler presented at this year's FOSDEM conference on debuginfod. If you would like to learn more about it there are the PDF slides and WebM session recording.