Hey Arnaldo, We use pahole pretty extensively here at Facebook, as you might imagine, given it's a required tool to compile Linux kernel with BTF. There are a few problems we periodically run into, all of which seems to be related to the fact that pahole is just a thin wrapper binary on top of libdwarves shared library. One very common problem is when we upgrade the dwarves package from one minor version to another one. Typically people would do yum upgrade dwarves And that would succeed to update the dwarves package (say 1.13 to 1.16). But when you run pahole --version You'll still see 1.13 (and still have 1.13 functionality, of course)... So what happens is that pahole *the binary* was updated, but libdwarves1 package, which is a dependency of dwarves package, wasn't updated. And the actual version string all pretty much all of the functionality is coming from libdwarves1. So users have to yum upgrade libdwarves1 explicitly. Which is, of course, not an obvious and frustrating experience. Also, whenever pahole is using some new API from libdwarves and libdwarves is outdated, that results in spectacular failure during dynamic linking time. Which makes sense because libdwarves doesn't maintain API stability per se and is supposed to match 1:1 w/ pahole version. But it all causes real logistics issues. So I have a few questions: 1. Is there anything on the RPM spec side that could be done to trigger libdwarves1 update when dwarves is updated and keep them in sync down to the minor version? 2. If not, can we add an option of statically linking libdwarves into pahole and other tools? That would eliminate all the problems altogether at the expense of a pretty negligible slight increase in the binary sizes. Thanks! -- Andrii
