506009 - Crash reporter "Unable to submit" ... "failed to move" if your Firefox profile is in a volume other than your home directory

Status: VERIFIED FIXED

(Toolkit :: Crash Reporting, defect)

Description

[Caeser_ts]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.1.1) Gecko/20090715 Firefox/3.5.1
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.1.1) Gecko/20090715 Firefox/3.5.1

Mozilla crash reporter says:
Firefox has a problem and crashed. We'll try to restore ur tabs....
Unfortunately the crash reporter is unable to submit a crash report.
Details: Couldn't move crash dump.

for months,came for the 1st time

Reproducible: Didn't try

Comment 1

[Dave Garrett]

First guess: Make sure the drive/partition your Firefox profile is on (probably C drive on Windows) isn't running out of space. You're not using a network share or something, are you?

Comment 2

[Caeser_ts]

maybe, leaving only 380MB free disk for firefox cache file in RAMDISK.
but this has nothing to do with profile partition.
free space is far from out in drive C

Comment 3

[Michael Ryan]

This would be easier to diagnose if bug 441142 was fixed :)

Comment 4

[Caeser_ts]

it just happened, u never mentioned it.
see this pic : http://twitpic.com/bbtqj
meanwhile,concerning with BUG 441142.

Comment 5

[Torsten Bronger]

I also get crashs on twitpic.  Is there also a bug for the crashs themselves?

Comment 6

[timeless]

so this is really bug 455394, which for whatever reason i didn't fix on Windows

Comment 7

[timeless]

Attachment: MoveFileEx

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa365240(VS.85).aspx

Comment 8

[Rain [:rain1] (inactive)]

Is your Firefox profile dir on a RAM disk? If so, does the crash reporter work if you move it back to its normal location?

Also, is your Crash Reports directory writable?

To test this:
1. In explorer, enter %APPDATA% in the address bar and press Enter
2. Go to Mozilla, then Firefox, then Crash Reports
3. Try creating a new file there. Right click -> New -> Text document. Does this work?

I can't reproduce the problem with my profile on an external hard drive.

Comment 9

[(not currently active) Ted Mielczarek]

I don't understand why MoveFileEx would fix this. From the MoveFile docs:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa365239%28VS.85%29.aspx
"The new name for the file or directory. The new name must not already exist. A new file may be on a different file system or drive."

Comment 10

[timeless]

Comment on attachment 400353 [details]
MoveFileEx

yeah i misread it. i think this of course was why i excluded this stuff from the other bug. so, we're left with "how in the world did a windows reporter trigger this error case"

Comment 11

[BugBot [:suhaib / :marco/ :calixte]]

The bug assignee didn't login in Bugzilla in the last months and this bug has severity 'major'.
:gsvelto, could you have a look please?
For more information, please visit auto_nag documentation.

Comment 12

[Alex Franchuk [:afranchuk]]

This is still a problem! I just tried on win10 and a profile on a different volume prevents the crash reporter from being able to move the file where it needs to go. This relates to bug 1884947, as we should examine whether we should be moving things away from the profile at all.

The solution here is to copy the file and delete the old one (or, if it's not too hard, detect whether they are the same mount/filesystem and only move in that case as an optimization).

Comment 14

[Rob Wu [:robwu]]

Analysis and implementation details from my report at bug 1909209 is below:

When I ran Firefox from a profile directory in /tmp/ (mounted as a tmpfs) and triggered a crash, the crash reporter was unable to report the crash. It showed a dialog with:

Firefox had a problem and crashed. Unfortunately, the crash reporter is unable to submit a report for the crash.

Details: Failed to move /path/to/profile/minidumps/uuid.dmp to /home/user/.mozilla/firefox/Crash Reports/pending/uuid.dmp

Looks like the error came from https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/rev/5756c5a3dea4f2896cdb3c8bb15d0ced5e2bf690/toolkit/crashreporter/client/app/src/config.rs#240-241

fs::rename is used to move the file, but that is documented to not work when the destination is on a different mountpoint: "This will not work if the new name is on a different mount point."

Comment 15

[Alex Franchuk [:afranchuk]]

Attachment: Bug 506009 - Crash reporter client: support profiles on different volumes than the home directory r=gsvelto

Rather than renaming files (which must be on the same
volume/filesystem), we copy and delete them. This is less efficient,
however the files in question are fairly small, so there's probably no
need to rename when we can as an optimization.

Comment 16

[Pulsebot]

Pushed by [e-mail]:
https://hg.mozilla.org/integration/autoland/rev/58633d79c80b
Crash reporter client: support profiles on different volumes than the home directory r=gsvelto

Comment 17

[Sandor Molnar[:smolnar]]

https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/58633d79c80b

Comment 18

[Daniel Darnell [:dandarnell]]

Comment on attachment 9414869 [details]
Bug 506009 - Crash reporter client: support profiles on different volumes than the home directory r=gsvelto

ESR Uplift Approval Request

• If this is not a sec:{high,crit} bug, please state case for ESR consideration: This issue breaks submitting crash reports in the Thunderbird flatpak. Since the default (stable) Thunderbird flatpak is based on Thunderbird ESR 128, it does not yet have this fix. It would be a boon to get this uplifted to Firefox ESR, and subsequently Thunderbird ESR, since the ability to submit crash reports is critical.
• User impact if declined: The crash reporter in the default (stable) flatpak cannot submit crash reports.
• Fix Landed on Version: 130
• Risk to taking this patch: Low
• Why is the change risky/not risky? (and alternatives if risky): This fix has been on both mozilla-central and mozilla-beta for a month without issue.

Comment 19

[Ryan VanderMeulen [:RyanVM]]

Comment on attachment 9414869 [details]
Bug 506009 - Crash reporter client: support profiles on different volumes than the home directory r=gsvelto

Approved for 128.3esr.

Comment 20

[Pulsebot]

https://hg.mozilla.org/releases/mozilla-esr128/rev/61e4f4a7e4fb

Comment 21

[Ina Popescu, Desktop QA]

We've reproduced this issue using Firefox 128.1.0 ESR on Windows 11 x64 by creating a Firefox profile on a portable USB drive. After navigating to about:crashparent in a new tab and hitting the Enter key, we received the following notification: Firefox had a problem and crashed. Unfortunately, the crash reporter is unable to submit a report for this crash.
The issue has been verified as fixed in the latest Nightly 132.0a1, Firefox 130.0.1 and Firefox 128.3.0 ESR versions across multiple devices( Windows 10/11 x64, macOS 13, and Ubuntu 22.04), as the issue no longer occurs.