News: 0001476540

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Ubuntu 24.10 To Enable Frame Pointers For More Packages

([Ubuntu] 2 Hours Ago Ubuntu 24.10 Frame Pointers)


With Ubuntu 24.04 LTS was a fundamental change made by Canonical to [1]enable frame pointers by default for their packages in the name of improving the debugging and profiling experience. This has been as part of a broader push by Canonical to [2]focus more on Ubuntu Linux performance and ensuring the needs of developers are met. With Ubuntu 24.10, more of the packages will have frame pointer support enabled.

While the intent with Ubuntu 24.04 LTS was to have all packages with frame pointers left in place by way of the "-fno-omit-frame-pointer" compiler flag, the option wasn't honored by all of the packages. In particular, for packages relying on hard-coded compiler flags that in turn followed the compiler default behavior of omitting the frame pointer.

[3]

From last week's [4]Ubuntu Foundations Team status updates , there's a push to address those packages where frame pointers aren't currently present. Multiple engineers at Canonical have been working to ensure frame pointers are enabled for relevant packages. Among the recently updated packages for Ubuntu 24.10 to ensure frame pointers are Authbind, Gobi-launcher, ubuntu-drivers-common, tftp-hpa, lp-solve, lshw, U-Boot tools, Crash, ipvsadm, google-compute-engine-oslogin, and others.

While the immediate focus is on ensuring packages are built with frame pointers to enhance debugging/profiling, these packaging fixes are ultimately good for ensuring other compiler options are also honored in the future. These packaging fixes are basically ensuring that the packages are honoring the CFLAGS/CXXFLAGS from the dpkg environment when being built. So these fixes will also help in the event Canonical down the line decides to use more aggressive compiler optimization defaults or other compiler tuning flags for packages moving forward.

It will be interesting to see what more Canonical pursues on the performance front for Ubuntu 24.10 that is due for release in October.



[1] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Ubuntu-Frame-Pointers-Default

[2] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Ubuntu-24.04-Perf-Tools-Propose

[3] https://www.phoronix.com/image-viewer.php?id=2024&image=ubuntu_2404_cc_lrg

[4] https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/foundations-team-updates-thursday-2024-07-04/46166



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