943142 - Build host minidump_stackwalk for B2G and Android

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Toolkit :: Crash Reporting, defect)

Description

[Jed Davis [:jld] ⟨⏰|UTC-7⟩ ⟦he/him⟧]

It would be useful if builds for B2G and Android included the tools needed to analyze their crash dumps, given that we already have source for them in our tree and we're already building breakpad's dump_syms as a host tool.

In particular, the test harnesses will collect and automatically dumps stacks from crashes if pointed to a minidump_stackwalk tool; TBPL has automation for this, but users of local builds are left to fend for themselves.

minidump_dump would also be useful.

I could try to fix this myself, but someone who understands the dependencies within the breakpad package, and what the moz.build files there are already doing, could probably do it faster.

Comment 1

[(not currently active) Ted Mielczarek]

We don't currently build a host minidump_stackwalk on any platform, FWIW. In automation we use prebuilt copies that live in the build/tools repo:
http://hg.mozilla.org/build/tools/file/tip/breakpad/

Buliding minidump_stackwalk from source on POSIX platforms is easy, it's just a configure+make. On Windows it's a pain, I build the prebuilt binaries under cygwin.

We don't have anything in the mozilla-central tree that's currently setup to build minidump_stackwalk, all the moz.build tools are for building the client bits of Breakpad.

I'm amenable to figuring something out here, I just don't know the right direction. We could add a step to "mach bootstrap" that fetches a working minidump_stackwalk binary for you and sets the environment variable appropriately so that things work.

Comment 2

[Kartikaya Gupta (email:[e-mail])]

+1 to producing a host minidump_stackwalk binary as part of the gecko build. It would have saved me much time diagnosing a recent b2g-desktop reftest failure I ran into. I've also wanted this tool on occasion in the past because buildbot uploads minidumps from failures and it's nice to be able to grab it and analyze it locally.

Comment 3

[Kartikaya Gupta (email:[e-mail])]

(In reply to Ted Mielczarek [:ted.mielczarek] from comment #1)
> Buliding minidump_stackwalk from source on POSIX platforms is easy, it's
> just a configure+make. On Windows it's a pain, I build the prebuilt binaries
> under cygwin.

Can we just do it on POSIX platforms then? It's better than nothing.

Comment 4

[Jed Davis [:jld] ⟨⏰|UTC-7⟩ ⟦he/him⟧]

(In reply to Kartikaya Gupta (email:[e-mail]) from comment #3)
> (In reply to Ted Mielczarek [:ted.mielczarek] from comment #1)
> > Buliding minidump_stackwalk from source on POSIX platforms is easy, it's
> > just a configure+make. On Windows it's a pain, I build the prebuilt binaries
> > under cygwin.
> 
> Can we just do it on POSIX platforms then? It's better than nothing.

It would also be better in some ways than the crash reporter itself, currently.  The configure script disables crash reporting if this is true:

  test "$OS_ARCH" != "$HOST_OS_ARCH" -a "$OS_ARCH" != "WINNT"

And that includes cross builds between two different POSIX platforms, like Mac-hosted builds of B2G (which are not uncommon).

Comment 5

[(not currently active) Ted Mielczarek]

This will not help at all in that situation. The problem there is that the dump_syms tool doesn't cross-compile well, so you can't dump symbols out to process the minidump.

Comment 6

[Sylvestre Ledru [:Sylvestre]]

Mass closing as we are no longer working on b2g/firefox os.

Comment 7

[Sylvestre Ledru [:Sylvestre]]

Mass closing as we are no longer working on b2g/firefox os.