From owner-freebsd-arch Sun Feb 25 7:14:24 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-arch@freebsd.org Received: from fledge.watson.org (fledge.watson.org [204.156.12.50]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id E55BA37B4EC for ; Sun, 25 Feb 2001 07:14:20 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from robert@fledge.watson.org) Received: from fledge.watson.org (robert@fledge.pr.watson.org [192.0.2.3]) by fledge.watson.org (8.11.1/8.11.1) with SMTP id f1PFEHh97295; Sun, 25 Feb 2001 10:14:17 -0500 (EST) (envelope-from robert@fledge.watson.org) Date: Sun, 25 Feb 2001 10:14:17 -0500 (EST) From: Robert Watson X-Sender: robert@fledge.watson.org To: Randell Jesup Cc: arch@FreeBSD.ORG, Alfred Perlstein , Mike Sinz , Bruce Bauman Subject: Re: ELF and diskless boot In-Reply-To: Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-arch@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG On 23 Feb 2001, Randell Jesup wrote: > FYI, is there a reason that we've set up our kernel interface to top, > etc to fail unless the kernel (in this case 4.x) is loaded with > _debugging_ symbols? I.e. if you strip a kernel, top (and a bunch of > other stuff) doesn't work because they can't find certain kernel > structures. To make this worse, they also fail if you etherboot > (because debug symbols aren't loaded). I won't comment on the symbol stripping issue since I don't know much/anything about that, but I can comment that we're in the process of moving to using sysctl() for top and other kernel-grubbing utilities, when used on a live system. top has already been changed to do this on -CURRENT, and patches to systat/dmesg/vmstat/... are in the wings. While this doesn't address your symbol stripping problem, it does mean that these utilities will continue to work despite a possibly over-stripped kernel. Before anyone asks, as they always do before reading the patches: yes, we're retaining support for using these commands on core dumps, as appropriate. Robert N M Watson FreeBSD Core Team, TrustedBSD Project robert@fledge.watson.org NAI Labs, Safeport Network Services To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-arch" in the body of the message