For reference, this is the dwz bug for [dwz] Support compressed debug sections: https://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=24725
It has low priority because it has a simple workaround: you could use eu-elfcompress before/after the dwz run $ eu-elfcompress --type=none ./a.out $ dwz ./a.out $ eu-elfcompress --type=zlib ./a.out Also adding elf section (de)compression to dwz would increase memory use even more for application. And dwz already has to be careful about memory usage. Even though adding it is fairly simple since dwz uses elfutils libelf so it is simply adding appropriate calls to elf_compress (section...) See https://gnu.wildebeest.org/blog/mjw/2016/01/13/elf-libelf-compressed-sections-and-elfutils/