Bug 1222344

Summary: gdb just getting stuck multiple minutes in silence when loading symbols(?) is very counter-intuitive
Product: [openSUSE] openSUSE Tumbleweed Reporter: ell1e <el>
Component: DevelopmentAssignee: Tom de Vries <tdevries>
Status: NEW --- QA Contact: E-mail List <qa-bugs>
Severity: Normal    
Priority: P5 - None    
Version: Current   
Target Milestone: ---   
Hardware: Other   
OS: Other   
Whiteboard:
Found By: --- Services Priority:
Business Priority: Blocker: ---
Marketing QA Status: --- IT Deployment: ---

Description ell1e 2024-04-04 23:21:38 UTC
I tried gdb for the first time to poke around firefox, and it was bit of an experience. A confusing hiccup always happens when having the symbols available and attaching to firefox (if I recall right the problem didn't show before I had downloaded the symbols so it's probably related to loading the symbols somehow):

EXPECTED BEHAVIOR: gdb either is fast, or prints out what it does. No progress info needed, just a little "Loading up symbols, this is taking longer than usual..." or whatever it's even doing would be useful.

ACTUAL BEHAVIOR: gdb will just get stuck without any sort of printed out line what it does or why or how long, and not react for like, 5 minutes or something extreme. The problem is that this is completely indistinguishable from the program just running, so naturally I'm inclined to hit CTRL+C except now that's a bad idea and doesn't just pause the program. This leads to a very confusing startup experience.

Is this something specific with openSUSE's gdb, a bug or a feature, or is this a general gdb upstream issue? Sould I forward this request somewhere?

AFFECTED VERSION: GNU gdb (GDB; openSUSE Slowroll) 13.2
Comment 1 Richard Biener 2024-05-08 08:11:48 UTC
It's a gdb upstream "bug", the firefox debuginfo is simply huge.