Compiling MariaDB for Debugging

Building MariaDB starting from 5.5

Compiling MariaDB with full debug information includes all code symbols and also new code to do internal test of structures and allow on to trace MariaDB execution. A full debug binary will be notable slower than a normal binary (30%).

On Unixes you need to pass -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug to cmake to compile with debug information.

The other option is to use the scripts in the BUILD directory that will compile MariaDB with most common debug options and plugins:

./BUILD/compile-pentium64-debug-max

There are separate build scripts for different configurations in the BUILD directory.

Example of building MariaDB with build scripts

Here is an example of how to compile MariaDB for debugging in your home directory with MariaDB 5.2.9 as an example:

cd ~
mkdir mariadb
cd mariadb
tar xvf mariadb-5.2.9.tar.gz
ln -s mariadb-5.2.9 current
cd current
./BUILD/compile-pentium64-debug-max

The last command will produce a debug version of sql/mysqld. If you have a system other than 64 bit Intel/AMD on Linux you can use a different BUILD/...-debug-max file. If this fails, you can try with:

./BUILD/autorun.sh
./configure --with-debug=full -with-extra-charsets=complex \
--with-plugin-aria --with-aria-tmp-tables --without-plugin-innodb_plugin \
--with-plugins=max \
--with-mysqld-ldflags=-all-static  --with-client-ldflags=-all-static 
make

Building with debug symbols

To build MariaDB with symbols, to get better stack traces and to be able to debug the binary with gdb, you need to supply the -g3 option to the gcc compiler.

Just compiling with -g3 will make the binary much bigger but the slowdown of the server should be neglectable.

One way to do this is to edit the script

BUILD/compile-pentium64-max

and add the -g3 last on the line with extra_flags, like this:

extra_flags="$pentium64_cflags $fast_cflags -g3"

After that you can compile MariaDB with debugging symbols by just execution the above script.