BTF has become useful without the BPF syscall being present.
It is used by debuggers and introspection tools like pahole.
The dependency prevents the usage of BTF without pulling in the
rest of the BPF subsystem.

Remove the dependency.

Signed-off-by: Thomas Weißschuh <thomas.weissschuh@linutronix.de>
---
 lib/Kconfig.debug | 1 -
 1 file changed, 1 deletion(-)

diff --git a/lib/Kconfig.debug b/lib/Kconfig.debug
index 1244dcac2294..f9dc5b60d834 100644
--- a/lib/Kconfig.debug
+++ b/lib/Kconfig.debug
@@ -399,7 +399,6 @@ config DEBUG_INFO_BTF
 	bool "Generate BTF type information"
 	depends on !DEBUG_INFO_SPLIT && !DEBUG_INFO_REDUCED
 	depends on !GCC_PLUGIN_RANDSTRUCT || COMPILE_TEST
-	depends on BPF_SYSCALL
 	depends on PAHOLE_VERSION >= 122
 	# pahole uses elfutils, which does not have support for Hexagon relocations
 	depends on !HEXAGON

---
base-commit: dc59e4fea9d83f03bad6bddf3fa2e52491777482
change-id: 20260731-btf-dep-bpf-syscall-210eaaf2b0cf

Best regards,
--  
Thomas Weißschuh <thomas.weissschuh@linutronix.de>

On Mon, Aug 03, 2026 at 09:52:39AM +0200, Thomas Weißschuh wrote:
> BTF has become useful without the BPF syscall being present.
> It is used by debuggers and introspection tools like pahole.
> The dependency prevents the usage of BTF without pulling in the
> rest of the BPF subsystem.
> 
> Remove the dependency.

Please disregard this patch.
Sashiko found a few valid issues:

https://sashiko.dev/#/patchset/20260803-btf-dep-bpf-syscall-v1-1-a03291e27888%40linutronix.de

The patch somehow passed the 0day bot. I'll investigate.

Also pahole is perfectly fine using DWARF debug data.
If no debug information is available at all, it prints an error about
missing BTF information, which confused me.


Thomas