Breakpad

What's Airbag?

Airbag is a crash reporting tool. This page talks about its implementation for Mozilla.

Airbag is now Breakpad. This is going to require some cleanup here and elsewhere.

Our implementation has two parts:

• Client integration to handle crash reporting so a central server can aggregate crash data to help improve our products.
• A web interface for viewing and parsing Airbag reports. We don't have a name yet for this project -- stay tuned (no, Airbag Server System is not an option).

More information about Airbag itself can be found at:

• Airbag Project Site
• Airbag Source
• Airbag Discussion Newsgroup
• Airbag Dev Newsgroup

Pages

• Feature List -- What do we want our Airbag web interface to do?
• Server Requirements -- How to set up the web app.
  • Development Planning & Design
• Seneca College Airbag Page -- Read about Seneca's awesome work with Airbag.
• Name Ideas -- Suggest a name for Airbag's web interface.
• Airbag Symbol Server

What's Going On

Just a braindump on what we'll need to replace Talkback with Airbag. There's a tracking bug on this now, bug 360327.

1. Client-side exception handler - win32 work done (bug 354980).
2. Client-side minidump sender - win32 work done (bug 354980).
3. Server-side minidump collector, CGI to accept POSTed minidump data. Current plans are just to call the minidump processor directly from this CGI. My simplistic collector. bug 358302 covers setting up an official server.
4. Server-side minidump processor - Mostly implemented by airbag processor, in the minidump_stackwalk example program, we will probably want to modify that a bit to make the output more machine readable, so we can store it in a DB.
5. Build-time symbol extractor - Provided by airbag tools - win32 work and tinderbox integration done (bug 359151), and(bug 362970
6. Server-side symbol store - For matching up stackdumps with symbols.
7. Server-side webapp to show details of crash reports, like talkback-public currently, will need a database backend

Mento's post outlines the Airbag project's proposed scope.

Win32 trunk nightlies currently include the airbag code, but it's disabled at runtime by default. To test it, you will need to set the environment variable MOZ_AIRBAG=1. Crash reports are currently collected at: http://mavra.perilith.com/~luser/airbag-collector/list.pl

Some of the Seneca students are looking into this.

http://benjamin.smedbergs.us/blog/2006-09-12/deploying-the-airbag/