1682520 - Use the WER runtime exception module to catch early crashes

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Toolkit :: Crash Reporting, task)

Description

[Gabriele Svelto [:gsvelto]]

At the moment we're unable to catch crashes happening during the early stages of startup, and specifically we can't catch crashes happening in firefox.exe before we've started XPCOM initialization, because crash reporting partially depends on it. The WER runtime exception module should have no such limitations so we should try to enable it as soon as possible during startup instead of waiting until Breakpad's exception handler is in place.

Comment 1

[Gabriele Svelto [:gsvelto]]

This applies to child processes too; since we don't need to wait for XPCOM initialization there too, we can just hook up WER ASAP (we only need to parse the last parameter on the command-line).

Comment 2

[Bob Owen (:bobowen)]

I've realised that my work in bug 1759167 is going to move the COM initialization before we have crash reporting, so we would really want this bug first if possible.

The COM initialization move has already happened for the main process, because of the skeleton UI and this explains why we don't get similar COM init crashes for that process.

Comment 3

[Bob Owen (:bobowen)]

I have some patches to register this very early on that are working locally.
At the moment it only uses the environment variable controls, because it is so early.

Looks like there is also ini file control of this that I imagine might affect corporate installations more, so that needs some consideration.

Possibly the best we could do is unregister the module once we have read things from the ini file.

Comment 4

[Bob Owen (:bobowen)]

Here's a try push with patches from bug 1759167 as well.
Obviously I need to fix up the spidermonkey build.
https://treeherder.mozilla.org/jobs?repo=try&revision=30f01ce8c8eb93692a7d05a0f43fe3dd6c20b2c8

Comment 5

[Bob Owen (:bobowen)]

Try push with the spidermonkey stuff fixed:
https://treeherder.mozilla.org/jobs?repo=try&revision=c1d19269b4f88de3ac3c2568a5dfb0785e69313c

Comment 6

[Bob Owen (:bobowen)]

Attachment: Bug 1682520 p1: Move GeckoProcessType and implementation of get and set into mozglue. r=glandium!

This means we can include these files in other binaries when we need earlier
access to the process type and use consistent code.

Comment 7

[Bob Owen (:bobowen)]

Attachment: Bug 1682520 p2: Register the WER Runtime Exception Module very early in process start up. r=gsvelto!,glandium!

Depends on D152198

Comment 8

[Bob Owen (:bobowen)]

New try push:
https://treeherder.mozilla.org/jobs?repo=try&revision=4cc8faa7799aee19931f4ca89f0becd8795d26ca

Comment 9

[Bob Owen (:bobowen)]

Latest try push after addressing current comments:
https://treeherder.mozilla.org/jobs?repo=try&revision=8b383ade00a1f6aea534acfb9f35c00a6e1342cf

Comment 10

[Bob Owen (:bobowen)]

Final (hopefully) try push on reviewed patches:
https://treeherder.mozilla.org/jobs?repo=try&revision=54f4c4c341c44365fc343cacca98e738ca111ebb

Comment 11

[Pulsebot]

Pushed by [e-mail]:
https://hg.mozilla.org/integration/autoland/rev/dad72c7e0d7b
p1: Move GeckoProcessType and implementation of get and set into separate files. r=glandium
https://hg.mozilla.org/integration/autoland/rev/679e19334225
p2: Register the WER Runtime Exception Module very early in process start up. r=gsvelto,glandium

Comment 12

[Cristian Tuns]

Backed out for causing build bustages on ProcessType.h

• Backout link
• Push with failures
• Failure Log
• Failure line: builds/worker/workspace/obj-build/dist/include/mozilla/ProcessType.h:33:45: error: inline function 'GeckoProcessType mozilla::GetGeckoProcessType()' declared weak [-Werror=attributes]

Comment 13

[Bob Owen (:bobowen)]

New try push, with the build that failed and a few more as well:
https://treeherder.mozilla.org/jobs?repo=try&revision=240f612a769c22082967b1055cadc72264800a56

Comment 14

[Pulsebot]

Pushed by [e-mail]:
https://hg.mozilla.org/integration/autoland/rev/9cd56f898487
p1: Move GeckoProcessType and implementation of get and set into mozglue. r=glandium
https://hg.mozilla.org/integration/autoland/rev/08607f50a78a
p2: Register the WER Runtime Exception Module very early in process start up. r=gsvelto,glandium

Comment 15

[Sandor Molnar[:smolnar]]

https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/9cd56f898487
https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/08607f50a78a