1616194 - Surface Linux lsb-release in crash-stats

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Socorro :: Webapp, task, P2)

Description

[Gabriele Svelto [:gsvelto]]

The stackwalker output should contain the parsed output of the minidump MD_LINUX_LSB_RELEASE stream which in turn contains the values stored in the /etc/lsb-release. This is useful information to figure out which Linux distro we are on. Ted added support for this in bug 602209 but it seems that we're not surfacing this data on crash-stats. It might be nice to use it for the platform pretty version field.

That being said this is fairly low priority because this is not present in all minidumps, and we have other ways of identifying the Linux distro though they're a bit awkward. We should also improve the support for this in the client-side library first.

Comment 1

[Will Kahn-Greene [:willkg] ET needinfo? me]

Grabbing this to look into. If it's easy, I'll do it this week. If it's involved, I may push it off.

Comment 2

[Will Kahn-Greene [:willkg] ET needinfo? me]

This crash report:

bp-53090204-c74f-4041-9caf-84ee30200218

has this lsb-release data:

    "lsb_release": {
        "codename": "bionic",
        "description": "Ubuntu 18.04.4 LTS",
        "id": "Ubuntu",
        "release": "18.04"
    }

To get that searchable, we'd need to extract it into separate variables in the processed crash report and then index those.

Gabriele: Do you just need the lsb_release.description or do you need all the fields? If all the fields, should we name them something like lsb_release_description, lsb_release_id, ...?

Comment 3

[Gabriele Svelto [:gsvelto]]

I'd love if we could surface lsb_release.description as the pretty platform version though I wonder if this would pose problems since we always used just "Linux" for it until now. That being said that's pretty much the only field we care about as it would allows to immediately tell what distro and what version a crash is coming from.

Comment 4

[Will Kahn-Greene [:willkg] ET needinfo? me]

We've got "platform", "platform version", and "platform pretty version". For Linux, it looks like "platform" is always Linux and "platform version" is a string like 0.0.0 Linux 5.2.0-kali2-amd64 #1 SMP Debian 5.2.9-2kali1 (2019-08-22) x86_64 and "platform pretty version" is always Linux.

For other platforms, "platform pretty version" is much more helpful. For example, Windows Server 2003 and OS X 10.14. I think using the lsb-release description for Linux where available is a really good move here for the example in comment #2.

I'll look at other lsb-release description values today and see what others look like.

If we decide to make this change, I'll make sure to announce an intent to change this to the stability email list and slack channel before doing the work.

Comment 5

[Will Kahn-Greene [:willkg] ET needinfo? me]

Examples:

• Arch Linux
• Astra Linux CE 2.12.22 (Orel)
• Astra Linux SE 1.6 (Smolensk)
• Guadalinex Edu 9 Next
• Linux Educacional 5.0
• Linux Mint 16 Petra
• Linux Mint 17.3 Rosa
• Linux Mint 18.1 Serena
• Linux Mint 18.2 Sonya
• Linux Mint 18.3 Sylvia
• Linux Mint 18 Sarah
• Linux Mint 19.1 Tessa
• Linux Mint 19.2 Tina
• Linux Mint 19.3 Tricia
• MX 19.1 patito feo
• Ubuntu 10.04.4 LTS
• Ubuntu 12.04.1 LTS
• Ubuntu 12.04.5 LTS
• Ubuntu 14.04.5 LTS
• Ubuntu 14.04.6 LTS
• Ubuntu 15.04
• Ubuntu 16.04.4 LTS
• Ubuntu 16.04.6 LTS
• Ubuntu 18.04.3 LTS
• Ubuntu 18.04.4 LTS
• Ubuntu 18.04 LTS
• Zorin OS 15.1

Also, Ubuntu 10.04.4... wow...

Comment 6

[Will Kahn-Greene [:willkg] ET needinfo? me]

This change will not be retroactive, so:

1. crash reports processed before the change will have platform pretty version of "Linux"
2. crash reports that either don't have an lsb-release description or the value is null will have "Linux"
3. crash reports processed after the change that have a non-null lsb-release description will have something like "Ubuntu 18.04 LTS"

I'm currently planning to make this change later today, but push it to production on Monday, February 24th.

Comment 7

[Gabriele Svelto [:gsvelto]]

Sounds good to me! Note that platform version is currently the output of uname -a, so basically the kernel version plus whatever each distro puts in there. It's not very useful and I've been using it as a proxy for what we'll have in the pretty version after this change. Also you'll have notice that we don't have a pretty name for every distro. Debian and Fedora are notably missing. We'll have to fix bug 1616195 first to get those.

Comment 8

[Will Kahn-Greene [:willkg] ET needinfo? me]

Attachment: pr 5223: bug 1616194: use json_dump.lsb_release.description for platform pretty version

Comment 9

[Will Kahn-Greene [:willkg] ET needinfo? me]

willkg merged PR #5223: "bug 1616194: use json_dump.lsb_release.description for platform pretty version" in d8dabe6.

Comment 10

[Will Kahn-Greene [:willkg] ET needinfo? me]

I deployed this in bug #1617605 just now. I reprocessed the last week of crashes for Firefox on Linux (46k). Marking as FIXED.