This post was co-authored by Oliver Smith, Ubuntu Product Manager, and Jon Seager, VP Engineering at Canonical.
Ubuntu’s long standing reputation for performance is rooted in our commitment to delivering the latest code, kernels and compilers. This commitment ensures that developers have access to the fastest and most secure environment for their applications. Today Canonical is raising the bar for performance and observability in all of our products.
In collaboration with Polar Signals we have committed that beginning with Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, our GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) package will enable frame pointers by default for 64-bit platforms. All packages in Ubuntu, with very few exceptions, will be rebuilt with frame pointers enabled, making them easier to profile and subsequently optimise.
“I’ve enabled frame pointers at huge scale for Java and glibc and studied the CPU overhead for this change, which is typically less than 1% and usually so close to zero that it is hard…
