1588742 - Replace breakpad's client code with a Rust implementation

Status: NEW

(Toolkit :: Crash Reporting, task)

Description

[Gabriele Svelto [:gsvelto] (PTO)]

This is the core bug to replace the existing client-side crash reporter implementation. It's made of multiple parts, many of which will be platform-specific so I will most likely split this bug further in the future. What needs to be done is:

• Consolidate the existing crash reporter interface so that it can be exposed from a Rust crate
• Write platform-specific exception handlers in Rust
• Write platform-specific functionality to generate minidumps from crashed processes
• Write a separate daemon that will be in charge of generating the crashes (no in-the-crashed-process minidump generation this time)
• Rewrite the code handling annotations to talk to the daemon
• Tie it all together in Firefox replacing the existing code

Since we're changing everything on the client side and moving to an out-of-process implementation things like the CrashReporterHost and other IPC-related machinery should be removed.

Comment 1

[Gabriele Svelto [:gsvelto] (PTO)]

Taking this as I will be actively working on it from now on. In addition to the description in comment 4 and the original design document some more requirements were added to the rewrite:

• We should be able to inject the exception handler in an unsuspecting process to support cases like SpiderMonkey testing (see bug 1522180 comment 3)
• We'd like to re-use the control code between Linux, macOS and other POSIX-ish platforms to keep platform-specific code to a minimum.