DEBUGINFOD-FIND(1)

NAME
debuginfod-find - request debuginfo-related data

SYNOPSIS
debuginfod-find [OPTION]... debuginfo BUILDID
debuginfod-find [OPTION]... debuginfo PATH
debuginfod-find [OPTION]... executable BUILDID
debuginfod-find [OPTION]... executable PATH
debuginfod-find [OPTION]... source BUILDID /FILENAME
debuginfod-find [OPTION]... source PATH /FILENAME
debuginfod-find [OPTION]... metadata KEY VALUE

DESCRIPTION
debuginfod-find queries one or more debuginfod servers for debuginfo-related data. In case of a match, it saves the the requested file into a local cache, prints the file name to standard output, and exits with a success status of 0. In case of any error, it exits with a failure status and an error message to standard error.

The debuginfod system uses buildids to identify debuginfo-related data. These are stored as binary notes in ELF/DWARF files, and are represented as lowercase hexadecimal. For example, for a program /bin/ls, look at the ELF note GNU_BUILD_ID:

    % readelf -n /bin/ls | grep -A4 build.id
    Note section [ 4] '.note.gnu.buildid' of 36 bytes at offset 0x340:
    Owner          Data size  Type
    GNU                   20  GNU_BUILD_ID
    Build ID: 8713b9c3fb8a720137a4a08b325905c7aaf8429d

Then the hexadecimal BUILDID is simply:

    8713b9c3fb8a720137a4a08b325905c7aaf8429d

In place of the hexadecimal BUILDID, debuginfod-find also accepts a PATH name to to an ELF binary, from which it extracts the buildid. This alternative is triggered if the file name has some character other than [0-9a-f]. Files ambiguously named files like "deadbeef" can be passed with a ./deadbeef extra path component.

  debuginfo BUILDID

If the given buildid is known to a server, this request will result in a binary object that contains the customary .*debug_* sections. This may be a split debuginfo file as created by strip, or it may be an original unstripped executable.

  executable BUILDID

If the given buildid is known to the server, this request will result in a binary object that contains the normal executable segments. This may be a executable stripped by strip, or it may be an original unstripped executable. ET_DYN shared libraries are considered to be a type of executable.

  source BUILDID /SOURCE/FILE

If the given buildid is known to the server, this request will result in a binary object that contains the source file mentioned. The path should be absolute. Relative path names commonly appear in the DWARF file's source directory, but these paths are relative to individual compilation unit AT_comp_dir paths, and yet an executable is made up of multiple CUs. Therefore, to disambiguate, debuginfod expects source queries to prefix relative path names with the CU compilation-directory, followed by a mandatory "/".

Note: for software packaged by distributions, the CU compilation-directory may not be obvious. It can be found by inspecting AT_comp_dir values in downloaded debuginfo. For example, the comp_dir of the Fedora 37 version of /bin/ls can be found as follows:

    % debuginfod-find debuginfo /bin/ls
    ~/.cache/debuginfod_client/03529d48345409576cd5c82a56ad08555088d353/
    % eu-readelf -w ~/.cache/debuginfod_client/03529d48345409576cd5c82a56ad08555088d353/debuginfo | grep comp_dir
               comp_dir             (line_strp) "/usr/src/debug/coreutils-9.1-6.fc37.x86_64/separate"

Note: the caller may or may not elide ../ or /./ or extraneous /// sorts of path components in the directory names. debuginfod accepts both forms. Specifically, debuginfod canonicalizes path names according to RFC3986 section 5.2.4 (Remove Dot Segments), plus reducing any // to / in the path.

For example:
#include <stdio.h> | source BUILDID /usr/include/stdio.h
/path/to/foo.c | source BUILDID /path/to/foo.c
../bar/foo.c AT_comp_dir=/zoo/ | source BUILDID /zoo//../bar/foo.c

  section BUILDID SECTION-NAME

If the given buildid is known to the server, this request will result in a binary file that contains the raw section contents, whether it is found in an executable or a separated debuginfo file.

  metadata KEY VALUE

All designated debuginfod servers are queried for metadata about all files that match a given key/value query in their index. The results include names and buildids, which may be used in future queries to fetch actual files.

KEY | VALUE | DESCRIPTION
file | path | exact match path, including in archives
glob | pattern | shell-style glob match pattern, including in archives, as in fnmatch(FNM_PATHNAME)
buildid | hex | all executables and debuginfo files matching the given buildid

The resulting output will look something like the following {
  "results":[
    {
      "type":"executable",
      "buildid":"f0aa15b8aba4f3c28cac3c2a73801fefa644a9f2",
      "file":"/usr/local/bin/hello",
      "archive":"/opt/elfutils/tests/test-2290642/R/rhel7/hello2-1.0-2.x86_64.rpm"
    },
    {
      "type":"executable",
      "buildid":"bc1febfd03ca05e030f0d205f7659db29f8a4b30",
      "file":"hello2"
    }
  ],
  "complete":true }'

The results of the search are output to stdout as a JSON object containing an array of objects, supplying metadata about each match, as well as a boolean value corresponding to the completeness of the result. The result is considered complete if all of the queries to upstream servers returned complete results and the local query succeeded. This metadata report may be cached. It may be incomplete and may contain duplicates. Additional JSON object fields may be present.

NAME | TYPE | DESCRIPTION
buildid | string | hexadecimal buildid associated with the file
type | string | one of debuginfo or executable
file | string | matched file name, outside or inside the archive
archive | string | archive containing matched file name, if any

It's worth noting that type cannot be source since in order to perform such a search fast enough additional indexing would need to be added to the database which would nearly double its size.

The search also always combines both files and archives in the results and at this time further granularity is not availible.

OPTIONS

-v --verbose
    Increase verbosity, including printing frequent download-progress messages and printing the http response headers from the server.

--help --usage
    Print some help and exit.

SECURITY

If IMA signature(s) are available from the RPMs that contain requested files, then debuginfod will extract those signatures into response headers, and debuginfod-find will perform verification upon the files. Validation policy is controlled via tags inserted into $DEBUGINFOD_URLS. By default, debuginfod-find acts in ignore mode.

If accessed across HTTP rather than HTTPS, the network should be trustworthy. Authentication information through the internal libcurl library is not currently enabled, except for the basic plaintext http[s]://userid:password@hostname/ style. (The debuginfod server does not perform authentication, but a front-end proxy server could.)

SEE ALSO
debuginfod(8) debuginfod_find_debuginfod(3)