apport/breakpad and fedora

[Will Woods]

On Mon, 2008-06-23 at 13:22 -0400, Colin Walters wrote:

> Breakpad: Used by Firefox and various Google applications.  Based on a
> shared library linked into processes which catches SIGSEGV and submits
> a report via HTTP.
> Format: http://code.google.com/p/google-breakpad/wiki/ProcessorDesign
> One nice thing is that Mozilla has a lot of investment in a free
> software scalable processing server called "Socorro":
> http://code.google.com/p/socorro
> 
> GNOME is using breakpad/socorro and has a server up:
> http://blogs.gnome.org/ovitters/2007/10/06/crash-gnome-org/
> They were prototyping it using Fedora, and I believe bug-buddy which
> is linked into all GTK+ programs uses breakpad and sends to
> crash.gnome.org by default.

> 
> * Possibly replace breakpad library linking by using utrace+system
> service (right?)

If I remember right, the reason for this part of the discussion was:

1) Linking everything on the system to breakpad is a bit nasty.
2) Apport doesn't need to be linked in, but it runs *after* the process
gets dumped by the kernel. At which point it's slightly different from
when it actually crashed. 

pjones' idea was to have a system service that would receive
notification of segfaults and use utrace to stop the process and
generate a (breakpad-style report).

> * Create debuginfo DAV server and pull debuginfo data dynamically
> (what are the download requirements?  does this replace gdb's
> "debuginfo-install" display?)

It would make the 'debuginfo-install' message go away, because (if DAV +
FUSE does the right thing) you'll have all the debuginfo you need, in
the right place - mounted as a FUSE filesystem. 

It requires some trickery with the web server to keep from *actually*
unpacking all the debuginfo packages in existence (something like ~5T of
data?) but Peter was working on a proof-of-concept at FUDCon.

> My 2¢ - Link in breakpad, create http://crash.fedoraproject.org
> running Socorro.  

Link it into what? Everything, via LD_PRELOAD? Or just GNOME stuff? I
thought bug-buddy already used breakpad?

Oh, and don't forget that we need the debuginfo server (which I think
Peter has been calling "littlebottom" to make these reports useful.

> Investigate either submitting reports to Mozilla as well for Firefox
> or create a system where our Socorro pushes reports to theirs. 

The latter seems like the Right Thing, but it depends on the previous
actions. I wonder how caillon would feel about getting Firefox doing
reports to Mozilla in the meantime.

>  Longer term investigate utrace system service instead of having apps
> link to breakpad (this gets us non-desktop system crashes without
> having to universally LD_PRELOAD or whatever).

Yeah, I don't think we need to solve this until we've got the
proof-of-concept stack: a couple of choice apps sending Breakpad reports
(with debuginfo fetched from littlebottom) to our own Socorro instance.

-w
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