On Sat, Nov 10, 2007 at 11:03:31AM -0500, der Mouse wrote:
> [..] and, unless and until the bootloader is
> improved to drop the debugging symbols, it's tens of megabytes of wired
> kernel memory.

The number of symbols does not differ between netbsd and netbsd.gdb. 
According to objdump none of the .debug* sections are marked as LOAD.

So unless I'm confused (quite possible) there should not be a runtime
cost once the kernel is loaded.

Of course this does not make sense on tiny machines booting via tftp
etc, but we are not talking about forcing the usage of the .gdb kernel
for all machines.

On a side note: one other severe cost is the kernel linktime.

Martin