Then Netflix can enable it for their systems? Are they actually still profiling cat and ls that come from the os or are they profiling their own applications and the interpreters and daemons they run on?
This does not explain why a distribution should have such a feature on by default. It only explains why Netflix wants it on some of their systems.
People across the industry are suffering from incomplete stacktraces because their applications call into libraries like glibc or OpenSSL that has frame pointer optimization enabled by their distro. It's pretty ridiculous to have to pull off a Linux from Scratch on CentOS just to get a decent stacktrace. Needless to say, this has nothing at all to do with profiling cat and ls.
OpenSSL is the worst because some configurations execute asm generated by a specialised program. That code clobbers the frame pointer (gotta go fast!) but isn't annotated with dwarf unwinding info (what do you mean you want to know what lead to your app crashing in OpenSSL?)...
I think it comes down to numbers. What are most installed systems used for? Do more than 50% of installed systems need to be doing this profiling all the time on just all binaries such that they just need to be already built this way without having to identify them and prepare them ahead of time?
If so, then it should be the default.
If it's a close call, then there should be 2 versions of the iso and repos.
As many developers and service operators as there are, as much as everyone on this page is including both you and I, I still do not believe the profiling use case is the majority use case.
The way I am trying to judge "majority" is: Pick a binary at random from a distribution. Now imagine all running instances of that binary everywhere. How many of those instances need to be profiled? Is it really most of them?
So it's not just unsympathetic "F developers/services problems". I are one myself.
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"people across the industry" is a meaningless and valueless term and is an empty argument.
This does not explain why a distribution should have such a feature on by default. It only explains why Netflix wants it on some of their systems.