What is "system-supplied DSO" that gdb references?

Question

I'm running gdb with set verbose on and I'm trying to understand one of the messages I am getting:

Reading symbols from system-supplied DSO at 0x7ffff7ffb000...(no debugging symbols found)...done.

What is thesystem-supplied DSO? After some search I think that DSO might stand for "dynamic shared object". But I still don't understand exactly what gdb is doing here and how I might solve the problem with the debugging symbols not being found (or if it even matters).

Also the program that I am debugging is being compiled with llvm-gcc and has an LLVM pass applied to it. I think that is effecting the behavior of gdb, but I"m not exactly sure how.

So essentially my question is what does the message that gdb prints mean, is it likely to cause a problem, and if so any suggestions on how I could help gdb find the debugging symbols.

Pressroom

Answer 1

In this context, system-supplied-DSO means a shared library provided directly by the linux kernel such as VDSO. Debuginfo is indeed available for them, but is packaged along with the kernel rather than userspace. Use debuginfod to automatically fetch them if your distro supports that.

Electroshock

Answer 2

According to this document a DSO is:

A dynamic shared object (DSO) is an object file that’s meant to be used simultaneously— or shared—by multiple applications (a.out files) while they’re executing.

I believe that a system supplied DSO is just a DLL provided by the OS and loaded by the main executable. Since this is an external library you don't have the debugging symbols of such object unless you download them separately. Typically the release binaries are stripped of debugging symbols but they can have a link to a separate file. A typical Linux distribution provides a package containing the debugging symbols of such binaries ( like the xxx-debuginfo-xxx.rpm for RedHat based distributions).

Droll