Debugging in Linux using core dumps

Question

What are the \'best practices\' when it comes to debugging core dumps using GDB?

Currently, I am facing a problem:

• The release version of my application is

Answer 1

You need to do some additional stuff to create binaries with stripped debug information that you can then debug from cores. Best description I could find is here

Answer 2

No, you don't miss anything. debug and release are just different binaries, so the core files of release don't match the debug binary. You have to look at machine code to get something from the release core dump.

You probably have to ask your user how the crash happened and collect additional log information or whatever you app produces.

Answer 3

It sounds like there are other differences between your release and debug build then simply the absence/presence of the -g flag. Assuming that's the case, there is nothing you can do right now, but you can adjust your build to handle this better:

Here's what we do at my place of work.

1. Include the -g flag when building the release version.
2. Archive that version.
3. run strip --strip-unneeded on the binary before shipping it to customers.

Now, when we get a crash we can use the archived version with symbols to do debugging.

One thing to note is that if your release version includes optimization, debugging may be difficult even with symbols. For example, the optimizer can reorder your code so even though the debugger will say you crashed on line N, you can't assume that the code actually executed line N-1.