818894 - Reimplement MinidumpWriteDump for Windows

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Toolkit :: Crash Reporting, defect)

Description

[(not currently active) Ted Mielczarek]

Breakpad on Windows relies on calling MiniDumpWriteDump from dbghelp.dll. This is great because we didn't have to write any of that code, but it sucks because MiniDumpWriteDump allocates memory, which means that it fails a lot when we crash due to OOM or heap corruption. The Microsoft documentation warns you about this, but it just tells you that you ought to call it from a separate process. This turns out to be a large and involved project (bug 587729). On Linux and Mac we have our own minidump-writing code which is a lot more careful about allocation (no calls to malloc) and other things that might be unsafe.

Reimplementing this function is a fairly large amount of work, but I think it would provide significant benefits to our crash reporting. It will likely require a fair amount of Win32 internals knowledge. It shouldn't, however, require any knowledge of Mozilla code.

Comment 1

[harsh chhabra]

hi sir,
I want to work on this bug,i am well acquainted with the knowledge of c/c++ and would do my best to solve above bug.

Comment 2

[(not currently active) Ted Mielczarek]

Hi Harsh,

I'll assign this bug to you for now, then. Do you know much about minidumps? If not I can provide you with some resources. Feel free to email me directly, or find me on irc.mozilla.org #introduction as ted.

Comment 3

[u467816]

hello,

I too would like to work on this bug. I am good at c/c++. Please guide me through this.

Comment 4

[Benjamin Smedberg]

Aish (or Harsh), this is a pretty large project. I would suggest that this is probably not the best project to start on. In any case, you need to understand the structure of a minidump file (starting here) http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/ms680378%28v=vs.85%29.aspx

Comment 5

[PoiLui]

Benjamin, I am actually working on the Bug, and have successfully ported the minidump_file_writer_unittest to Windows. Have already informed Ted, and emailed him the updated repository link. Please reassign the Bug to me.

Comment 6

[Benjamin Smedberg]

Oh sorry, I didn't see any updates. Feel free to attach WIP patches here.

Also see bug 942873 which I just filed, which is another way to solve this same problem which is probably faster and easier.

Comment 7

[Gabriele Svelto [:gsvelto]]

We're moving minidump generation fully out of process so this won't be needed anymore.