What is “system-supplied DSO” that gdb references?

Question

I'm running gdb with set verbose on and I'm trying to understand one of the messages I am getting:

Reading symbols from system-supplied DSO at 0x7ffff7ffb000...(no debugging symbols found)...done.

What is thesystem-supplied DSO? After some search I think that DSO might stand for "dynamic shared object". But I still don't understand exactly what gdb is doing here and how I might solve the problem with the debugging symbols not being found (or if it even matters).

Also the program that I am debugging is being compiled with llvm-gcc and has an LLVM pass applied to it. I think that is effecting the behavior of gdb, but I"m not exactly sure how.

So essentially my question is what does the message that gdb prints mean, is it likely to cause a problem, and if so any suggestions on how I could help gdb find the debugging symbols.

Answer 1

A good description of system-supplied DSO (also known as vdso) can be found here.