942873 - Move minidump collection from the Firefox process to the crashreporter process (Windows-only?)

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 587729

(Toolkit :: Crash Reporting, defect)

Description

[Benjamin Smedberg]

Currently when the main Firefox process crashes, the minidump is taken from within the Firefox process itself. OOM issues can cause MinidumpWriteDump to fail, leaving a malformed or 0-byte minidump. It would be better to take the minidump from another process (presumably the crashreporter process):

* stop all Firefox threads
* launch the crashreporter process with a pipe
* take the minidump from the crashreporter process
* then exit/kill the Firefox process

Comment 1

[(not currently active) Ted Mielczarek]

I looked into reusing the existing Breakpad OOP codepaths to do this, I started with Linux and Mac (I think they were simpler at the time):
http://hg.mozilla.org/users/tmielczarek_mozilla.com/breakpad-oop-test/

It would probably be simpler to roll our own solution here using Breakpad's FilterCallback (called before writing a minidump) to write the .extra metadata and launch the crashreporter, which could do the real dump writing. It might be tricky to get 100% feature parity with what we have now with things like additional memory regions marked to be included in the dump etc, but getting something working doesn't sound like a huge effort.

Comment 2

[(not currently active) Ted Mielczarek]

Oh! bug 587729 was filed on this, ages ago.