Apport

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Apport - Automatic crash reports

What is this all about?

Debugging program crashes without any automated tools has been pretty time consuming and hard for both developers and users. Many program crashes remain unreported or unfixed because:

  • Many crashes are not easily reproducible.
  • End users do not know how to prepare a report that is really useful for developers, like building a package with debug symbols, operating gdb, etc.

  • A considerable part of bug triage is spent with collecting relevant information about the crash itself, package versions, hardware architecture, operating system version, etc.
  • There is no easy frontend which allow users to submit detailed problem reports.
  • Existing solutions like bug-buddy or krash are specific to a particular desktop environment, are nontrivial to adapt to the needs of a distribution developer, do not work for crashes of background servers (like a database or an email server), and do not integrate well with existing debug packages that a distribution might provide.

Apport is a system which

  • intercepts crashes right when they happen the first time,
  • gathers potentially useful information about the crash and the OS environment,
  • can be automatically invoked for unhandled exceptions in other programming languages (e. g. in Ubuntu this is done for Python),
  • can be automatically invoked for other problems that can be automatically detected (e. g. Ubuntu automatically detects and reports package installation/upgrade failures from update-manager),
  • presents a UI that informs the user about the crash and instructs them on how to proceed,
  • and is able to file non-crash bug reports about software, so that developers still get information about package versions, OS version etc.

We hope that this will lead to a much better level of quality assurance in the future.

What does it look like for users?

The user side of apport is designed to be extremely simple and as unannoying as possible.

If any process in the system dies due to a signal that is commonly refered to as a 'crash' (segmentation violation, bus error, floating point exception, etc.), or e. g. a packaged Python application raises an uncaught exception, the apport backend is automatically invoked. It produces an initial crash report in a file in /var/crash/ (the file name is composed from the name of the crashed executable and the user id). If the crashed process belongs to the user who is currently logged in, or it belongs to a system process and the user is an administrator, apport informs the user about the crash and offers to report the problem:

  • attachment:apport-gtk-desktopfile.png

If an user process crashes while the user is not currently logged in, update-notifier will present a notification when the user starts a desktop session the next time:

  • attachment:apport-async-crash.png

Clicking on the icon will cause the same frontend to appear. The notification is also shown for crashes of system processes; since they need the frontend being invoked as root, immediately starting it through gksu would be too disruptive.

Now apport collects various debug information and asks the user what to do with it:

  • attachment:apport-gtk-report.png

Experienced users can also take a look into the report content:

  • attachment:apport-gtk-report-details.png

If the user chooses "Send report", apport-gtk uploads the collected information to the bug tracking system. After that it opens the packages' bug filing page with a sensible default bug title and leaves the rest of bug filing process to the web UI.

I'm a developer. How to I use these crash reports?

Report format

apport internally uses the standard Debian control syntax for reports, i. e. keeps everything in a flat file that looks like this:

DistroRelease: Ubuntu 6.10
ExecutablePath: /usr/bin/gcalctool
Package: gcalctool 5.8.24-0ubuntu2
ProcCmdline: gcalctool
ProcEnviron:
 SHELL=/bin/bash
 PATH=/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/bin/X11:/usr/games
 LANG=de_DE.UTF-8
StackTrace:
 [...]
 #0  0x00002ae577bb37bf in poll () from /lib/libc.so.6
 No symbol table info available.
 #1  0x00002ae57786991e in g_main_context_check () from /usr/lib64/libglib-2.0.so.0
 No symbol table info available.
 [...]
CoreDump: base64
 eJzsXQmcFMXV7+XGA0dBREVoDxSPXQYEB...

Only a tiny subset of the available fields are shown here. Apport reports include a core dump in a compressed and uuencoded format, which is useful for post-mortem debugging and post-mortem generation of a symbolic stack trace.

However, when uploading the data to a bug tracking system, a different format can be used. e. g. when using [https://launchpad.net Launchpad], the data is uploaded in Multipart/MIME format so that the small parts land directly in the bug summary and the big parts become separate bug attachments.

Tools

There are several tools available for working with a crash report:

  • apport-unpack: Unpack a report into single files (one per attribute). This is most useful for extracting the core dump. Please see the manpage for further details. This tool is not necessary when working with Launchpad, since it already splits the parts into separate attachments.

  • apport-retrace: Regenerate stack traces of a report. If you supply the -d option, this tool will automatically download available debug symbol packages and use them to generate a symbolic stack trace. The manpage explains the functionality and all available options in detail.

  • python-problem-report: This package ships a Python module problem_report which provides general dictionary access to a crash report and loading/saving methods (not specific to apport reports).

  • python-apport: This ships a Python package apport which encapsulates core functionality of apport and is specific to crash and bug reports. You can use it to implement your own frontends and backends.

How does it work internally?

Crash interception

The Ubuntu 6.10 Linux kernel has a patch to call a usermode helper in the event of a crash (in kernel terms: whenever the process would dump its core if ulimit -c is nonzero). This usermode helper is configured in /proc/sys/kernel/crashdump-helper. To avoid cluttering the disk with core dumps, the default ulimit is kept at 0, and instead the kernel introduces a second size limit for temporary core dumps in /proc/sys/kernel/crashdump-size.

Ubuntu 7.04 uses kernel 2.6.19's new feature of using /proc/sys/kernel/core_pattern with a pipe. The core dump is directly piped into apport, and the other information (such as the signal number and PID) is passed through environment variables.

Backend

In order to keep the delay and CPU/IO impact as low as possible, /usr/share/apport/apport only collects data which has to be acquired while the crashed process still exists: information from /proc/pid, the core dump, the executable path, and the signal number. The report is written to /var/crash/executable_path.uid.crash.

Frontend invocation

In Gnome, update-notifier keeps an inotify watch on /var/crash. Whenever there is something new, it calls /usr/share/apport/apport-checkreports. If there are new reports, it calls /usr/share/apport/apport-gtk, which is the frontend shown in the screenshots above.

Launchpad-based auto-retracer

The Canonical data center runs a service which automatically retrace bugs with apport. By tagging the bugs according to architecture in Launchpad, a retrace will be done and the tag will be removed. Tags that are used are need-i386-retrace, need-amd64-retrace or need-ppc-retrace. See the [https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel/2007-March/023440.html announcement].

Per-package Apport Hooks

For examples on how to include apport-specific hooks in packages, see:

  • ubiquity - adds additional debugging details to crash report
  • usplash - ignores crashes in specific code paths

in /usr/share/apport/package-hooks .

Use the source, Luke!

Future plans

Apport (last edited 2017-05-25 20:03:48 by penalvch)