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Accelerated Linux Core Dump Analysis

Use External Debugging Information

Explore how to use external debugging information to improve Linux core dump analysis. Learn to load stripped executables with separate debug symbols in GDB, print detailed stack traces with filenames and line numbers, and verify source code during debugging. This lesson helps you diagnose faults more effectively by integrating symbol files into your debugging workflow.

We'll cover the following...

Application source code

For this lesson, we’ve created two executables from this code: one with the debug information and one in which the debug information has been stripped off.

C
// Build:
// gcc main.c -g -pthread -static -o App2S
#include <stdio.h>
#include <pthread.h>
#include <unistd.h>
#include <string.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
void procA()
{
    sleep(1);
    int *p = NULL;
    *p = 1;
}
void procB()
{
    sleep(2);
    void (*pf)() = NULL;
    
    pf();
}
#define THREAD_DECLARE(num,func) void bar_##num() \
{ \
    func; \
} \
\
void foo_##num() \
{ \
    bar_##num(); \
} \
\
void * thread_##num (void *arg) \
{ \
    foo_##num(); \
    \
    return 0; \
}
THREAD_DECLARE(one,sleep(-1))
THREAD_DECLARE(two,procA())
THREAD_DECLARE(three,sleep(-1))
THREAD_DECLARE(four,procB())
THREAD_DECLARE(five,sleep(-1))
#define THREAD_CREATE(num) {pthread_t threadID_##num; pthread_create (&threadID_##num, NULL, thread_##num, NULL);}
int main(int argc, const char * argv[])
{
    THREAD_CREATE(one)
    THREAD_CREATE(two)
    THREAD_CREATE(three)
    THREAD_CREATE(four)
    THREAD_CREATE(five)    
    
    sleep(3);
    return 0;
}

Loading the core dump

The first thing we are going to do is load the dump file that we have included with the course.

 gdb -c core.App2S -se App2S

The above command will output the ...