Ubuntu 22.10 Adds Debuginfod Integration
Debuginfod allows for querying a remote HTTP server for debug assets automatically by the likes of Binutils' readelf and objdump utilities or the GNU Debugger (GDB) itself. The debuginfod server is able to provide the ELF/DWARF debug files to clients as needed.
Red Hat has been leading the ecosystem work on debuginfod and is used by default since Fedora 35. Rather than needing all of the debug assets locally, the debugging components can simply query the remote server for what assets are needed. This in turn saves disk space and rather convenient, assuming you are always on an Internet-connected system. Arch Linux started their debuginfod server several months back.
While initially focused on the GNU toolchain support, LLVM this year added debuginfod server support.
Ubuntu's upstream, Debian, started their debuginfod server last year. With Ubuntu 22.10, Canonical is now supporting Debuginfod as an alternative to developers needing to manually install the debuginfo packages. Ubuntu's Debuginfod server is currently serving up DWARF information while plans to add index and source code too is expected in the future. On Ubuntu 22.10 and later, when installing the likes of GDB the user will be prompted whether to use debuginfod -- or can be changed by re-configuring the libdebuginfo-common package.
More details on the initial debuginfod integration for Ubuntu 22.10 can be found via the Ubuntu Discourse.
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