stock vmlinux has no symbols
Unless you have compiled your own kernel, you will not have a readily accessible vmlinux, which is an ELF executable. Instead, you will have a compressed kernel in /boot, usually named vmlinuz-<kernel_version>. This compressed kernel image can be decompressed, but the result is a kernel executable that has no symbol table. This poses a problem for forensics analysts or kernel debugging with GDB. The solution for most people in this case is to hope that their Linux distribution has a special package with their kernel version having debug symbols. If so, then they can download a copy of their kernel that has symbols from the distribution repository. In many cases, however, this is not possible, or not convenient for ...
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