RFR: 8374507: GHA: Limit debug symbols generation to conserve disk space

[Aleksey Shipilev]

On Tue, 6 Jan 2026 07:38:19 GMT, Aleksey Shipilev <shade at openjdk.org> wrote:

>> I have noticed that Linux x86_64 fastdebug build jobs started to fail in GHA with no free space left on device. Instrumenting GHA runs shows we have about 17G of free space on those runners. 
>> 
>> 
>> Filesystem  Size  Used  Avail Use% Mounted on
>> /dev/root    72G   56G   17G   78% /
>> 
>> 
>> [GHA docs](https://docs.github.com/en/actions/reference/runners/github-hosted-runners#standard-github-hosted-runners-for-public-repositories) say there is 14G of guaranteed disk space on runners. This is a bit beyond what our fastdebug builds need. My local build says disabling debug symbols bundling reduces the space requirement from 16G -> 11G, without regressing tests.
>> 
>> Testing:
>>  - [x] Ad-hoc JVM crash to verify that stack trace generation still works
>>  - [x] GHA
>
> Thank you! I am integrating now to unbreak GHA.

> @shipilev I'm a bit late to the game here but maybe we should try --with-external-symbols-in-bundles=public on Windows in order to get file and method names in case of crashes. Not sure whether it'll be again too much of disk space needed, though...

Oh. Yes, please try that? Really we wanted to improve Linux side of things, that is where we are scratching the runner space limits. I have not looked at Windows side at all; so please experiment and see how bad is it? I also have this improvement for Linux/MacOS: https://github.com/openjdk/jdk/pull/29056 -- again, does not help Windows, since I cannot find a useful/relevant MSVC toggle there.

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PR Comment: https://git.openjdk.org/jdk/pull/29030#issuecomment-3713766995