2008/6/23 Will Woods <wwoods@redhat.com>:



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.

Yeah, sounds right. 

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).

He was thinking of hooking it into kerneloops, right? 

(Hm, I didn't seem to have that installed on my F9 system which was upgraded from F8...I guess this is a generic problem with new comps packages and upgrades; need to solve that)

Though isn't there a race between when we get the kernel notification and when the service stops it and inspects?  Not my area of expertise really, just thinking out loud.
 
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.

Ah, ok.


> 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?

I'm personally most interested in the desktop apps because, well we desktop developers are masochists and code complex user-facing code in C/C++, and not surprisingly they crash =)

So right now...hm, actually this is weird, I can't get any Fedora-compiled program to spawn bug-buddy at all right now.  I get it for some local custom code, but not for anything in /usr/bin.  I see libgnomebreakpad is linked into the process.

I'm out of time for this issue for today, I'll investigate a bit more later.
 

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.

Yeah, we should probably disable GTK+'s bug-buddy breakpad module for Firefox for now.

>  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.

Ok cool.  Should we create a feature proposal wiki page for this, or repurpose the old Apport one?