869917 - Breakpad fails to write a dump on Linux when there are no available file descriptors

Status: NEW

(Toolkit :: Crash Reporting, enhancement, P2)

Description

[(not currently active) Ted Mielczarek]

I hit a crash on Android due to exhausting available file descriptors. Unfortunately I also wound up with an empty minidump. This makes sense, because Breakpad needs to open some files to gather information and write the dump. We could probably fix Breakpad to close a few fds after it clone()s to dump the crashed process.

Comment 1

[Gabriele Svelto [:gsvelto]]

I was about to file a new bug... but we already knew file descriptor exhaustion was a problem! Bumping the priority on this one and CC'ing everybody who might be interested.

Comment 2

[Jed Davis [:jld] ⟨⏰|UTC-8⟩ ⟦he/him⟧]

The other problem is that the crash reporter needs to create a pipe so the crashing process can know when the dump request has been acted on and not exit until then; child processes don't need to (and generally can't) open the minidump file themselves, but they still need a pipe to receive the reply from the crash reporter. But it should be relatively easy to preallocate that. The parent process is a little more complicated, because currently it clones a child process to act as the crash reporter and that process needs to do file I/O etc., so it needs more fds.