DaveMalcolm/DebugSettings

There's a trade-off to be made between performance and debugging. During the "rawhide" phase where we develop Fedora N+1 it makes sense to turn on some debug features that catch bugs, but which incur performance cost. We can then turn them off whilst polishing the release.

Specific Debug Features

To be written
Need to gather a list of debug features here.

For each one:

Template

What it does:
What is the performance cost:
Bugs found using it:
How to tell if it's turned on:

TODO:

• kernel hooks
• glibc hooks: MALLOC_PERTURB
• any more?

Login message

We ought to give people a heads-up that they're running with debug features, and link to information on them, to avoid e.g. bad benchmarks.

At terminal

Fedora release 15 (Sesquipedalian)
Kernel 2.6.33.3-79.fc13.x86_64 on an x86_64

This is a pre-release version of Fedora, and is running with extra
diagnostics that help find bugs, but impact performance.

Please read
[[DaveMalcolm/DebugSettings]]
before attempting to run benchmarks on this system.

Obviously we'd fix the link to a more permanent version of this page.

How to do this? /etc/issue ?

Graphical desktop

Pop up a dialog with the same text:

+--------------------------------------------------------------------+
| This is a pre-release version of Fedora, and is running with extra |
| diagnostics that help find bugs, but impact performance.           |
|                                                                    |
| Please read [[DaveMalcolm/DebugSettings]]                          |
| before attempting to run benchmarks on this system.                |
|                                                                    |
| [ ] Don't show this again                                          |
|                                                             [ OK ] |
+--------------------------------------------------------------------+