BreakpadApplicationSupport

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Revision 3 as of 2013-01-23 14:32:25
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svn checkout http://google-breakpad.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ google-breakpad
cd google-breakpad; ./configure
./src/processor/minidump_stackwalk ~/.mozilla/firefox/Crash\ Reports/pending/*.dmp
svn checkout http://google-breakpad.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ ~/google-breakpad
cd ~/google-breakpad; ./configure
Line 12: Line 11:

Just like a regular binary application crash on Ubuntu, Chrome and Firefox are stripped of symbols needed to produce a complete stack trace. For Firefox, these live in the firefox-mozsymbols package, which produces a 21MB zip file:

{{{
sudo apt-get install firefox-mozsymbols
mkdir /tmp/syms
cd /tmp/syms
unzip /usr/lib/firefox/firefox-18.0.en-US.linux-x86_64.crashreporter-symbols.zip
}}}

With these in place, we can now produce a full stack trace:
{{{
cd ~/google-breakpad
./src/processor/minidump_stackwalk ~/.mozilla/firefox/Crash\ Reports/pending/*.dmp /tmp/syms
}}}

Breakpad is a client-side library used by Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox for error reporting.

While the reports generated by Breakpad are best handled by Google and Mozilla themselves, it is worthwhile for us to collect them too. Without the error data from Firefox and Chrome, our calculation for the average errors per calendar day will be inaccurate, unless we consider it to be the average number of errors that we can directly fix. We will also not know what the stability of these browsers is relative to other applications in Ubuntu.

Breakpad's tools are not currently packaged for Ubuntu. To get the minidump_walk binary, which will translate a minidump-formatted report into a stack trace, branch Breakpad from svn:

svn checkout http://google-breakpad.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ ~/google-breakpad
cd ~/google-breakpad; ./configure

Just like a regular binary application crash on Ubuntu, Chrome and Firefox are stripped of symbols needed to produce a complete stack trace. For Firefox, these live in the firefox-mozsymbols package, which produces a 21MB zip file:

sudo apt-get install firefox-mozsymbols
mkdir /tmp/syms
cd /tmp/syms
unzip /usr/lib/firefox/firefox-18.0.en-US.linux-x86_64.crashreporter-symbols.zip

With these in place, we can now produce a full stack trace:

cd ~/google-breakpad
./src/processor/minidump_stackwalk ~/.mozilla/firefox/Crash\ Reports/pending/*.dmp /tmp/syms

ErrorTracker/BreakpadApplicationSupport (last edited 2013-01-23 15:00:09 by ev)