While working on a PHP script recently when I stumble upon a nasty bug that leaves only a “Segmentation fault” while preparing statements with Zend_Db_Adapter_Mysqli. Attempting to gdb the same process only results in gibberish like below and nothing more. The problem is that, the PHP cli is a stripped binary and on CentOS (and Fedora 14 at least with PHP 5.3.8) there is no debuginfo package to provide these symbols, you’ll have to compile PHP yourself to debug further.


#19635 0x000000000046b13b in ?? ()
#19636 0x000000000046b231 in ?? ()
#19637 0x000000000046b13b in ?? ()
#19638 0x000000000046b231 in ?? ()
#19639 0x000000000046cb3f in ?? ()
#19640 0x000000000047c76f in php_pcre_exec ()
#19641 0x0000000000480d46 in php_pcre_replace_impl ()
---Type to continue, or q to quit---
#19642 0x0000000000481f0d in ?? ()
#19643 0x0000000000482504 in ?? ()
#19644 0x0000000000482a33 in ?? ()
#19645 0x00000000005e8f19 in ?? ()
#19646 0x00000000005e847b in execute ()
#19647 0x00000000005c1395 in zend_execute_scripts ()
#19648 0x0000000000571418 in php_execute_script ()
#19649 0x000000000064b5a0 in ?? ()
#19650 0x000000314821d994 in __libc_start_main () from /lib64/libc.so.6
#19651 0x00000000004222b9 in _start ()


My appeal to the PHP package builders (CentOS/Fedora mainstream, RPMForge, Atomic) – please please please – include a debuginfo package on your repo