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Added information about the minidump writers
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== Minidump writers == | == Minidump writers == | ||
Status: in progress<br> | |||
Developer(s): gsvelto, msirringhaus (contributor) and other external contributors<br> | |||
Source code:<br> | |||
* https://github.com/rust-minidump/minidump-writer | |||
Original source code:<br> | |||
* https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/source/toolkit/crashreporter/breakpad-client/ | |||
Bugs:<br> | |||
* {{bug|1620998}} | |||
=== Description === | |||
Minidump writers are at the core of the crash reporting infrastructure. They | |||
extract information about a crashed process - such as register contents, thread | |||
states & stack, interesting memory areas, list of memory mappings, etc... - and | |||
store them in a file following Microsoft minidump format plus a few extensions | |||
commonly used extensions. We currently leverage Breakpad's minidump writers for | |||
generating minidumps across all platforms. | |||
=== Rationale === | |||
The minidump writers manipulate the memory of a crashed process and have | |||
several complex failure modes. Breakpad's writers have several issues that are | |||
difficult to address: | |||
* They are not very robust, sometimes failing to generate a minidump at all in cases where a partial one could be made | |||
* Their error-reporting is almost non-existent. This makes it impossible to diagnose issues when they're encountered in the wild | |||
* The existing code has limited test coverage and extending it is complex | |||
* They are designed to support both out-of-process and in-process generation, this adds a significant amount of complexity we don't need | |||
* The requirement to write in-process minidumps forces the code to do bare syscalls and avoid memory allocations, this heavily contributes to the existing code's complexity | |||
* They are tightly bound to Breakpad's architecture making it impossible to re-use them in other contexts | |||
* The way they communicate with other processes when doing out-of-process crash generation is highly platform-specific, not hidden behind an abstraction and brittle (some code relies on timeouts not to cause deadlocks!) | |||
Because of the above we'd like to rewrite the writers in Rust using a more modular architecture, extensive error-reporting and full test coverage. | |||
=== Plan === | |||
The rewrite calls for the following to be done: | |||
* We will prepare a crate which will have the only purpose of offering minidump writing | |||
* We will re-implement the writers starting from Breakpad's code one platform at a time starting with Linux, then Windows, then macOS | |||
* We will only implement out-of-process crash generation, cutting out the need for brittle in-process generation code | |||
* Functionality to synthesize minidumps will be provided to facilitate testing | |||
* Non-Microsoft extensions will be documented and provided with test-coverage, possibly integrating them with rust-minidump so that we'd have a single source of truth WRT them | |||
== Crash monitor == | == Crash monitor == | ||