Breakpad for MinGW and more

Google Breakpad with added support for MinGW, maintained for the
Dæmon game engine and the
Unvanquished game.

Upstream for the Dæmon branch: https://github.com/DaemonEngine/breakpad
Bug tracker for the Dæmon branch: https://github.com/DaemonEngine/breakpad/issues

Dæmon Breakpad

Breakpad is a set of client and server components which implement a crash-reporting system.

The Dæmon Breakpad adds Cygwin/MinGW support to Google Breakpad, based on Jon Turney's patches,
with merged Google upstream adding support for DWARF5 debugging information format.
It retains the support for systems already supported by the Google Breakpad upstream.

It provides:

A set of dump_syms tools to process debugging informations from various binary format like Linux ELF
executables, MinGW PE/COFF executables with DWARF debug information for Windows,
Native Client binaries and others.
The breakpad crash-reporting client libraries built using Makefiles rather than MSVC solutions.

Compiling

Preparation

Optional: Run the fetch-externals script to fetch submodules in the DEPS file (e.g the gyp and gtest dependencies).
(The Google upsteam repository is meant to be checked out using Chromium's depot_tools, which does this for you).
This is not needed to build Breakpad.

./fetch-externals

Building

💡️ Instead of -j4 you can use -jN where N is your number of CPU cores to distribute compilation on them.
Linux systems usually provide a handy nproc tool that tells the number of CPU core so you can just do -j$(nproc)
to use all available cores.

Run autoreconf to generate ./configure:

autoreconf -fvi

Run ./configure to configure the build:

./configure

Run make to build:

make -j4

This will produce dump_syms.exe, minidump_dump.exe, minidump_stackwalk.exe, libbreakpad.a,
and for MinGW libcrash_generation_client.a, libcrash_generation_server.a, crash_generation_app.exe

The dump_syms tool to process Linux binaries can be found as src/tools/linux/dump_syms/dump_syms and the one to process MinGW binaries can be found as src/tools/windows/dump_syms_dwarf/dump_syms.

Using

See Getting started with breakpad in Chromium documentation.

Producing and installing symbols

dump_syms crash_generation_app.exe >crash_generation_app.sym
FILE=`head -1 crash_generation_app.sym | cut -f5 -d' '`
BUILDID=`head -1 crash_generation_app.sym | cut -f4 -d' '`
SYMBOLPATH=/symbols/${FILE}/${BUILDID}/
mkdir -p ${SYMBOLPATH}
mv crash_generation_app.sym ${SYMBOLPATH}

Generating a minidump file

A small test application demonstrating out-of-process dumping called
crash_generation_app.exe is built.

Run it once, selecting "Server->Start" from the menu
Run it again, selecting "Client->Deref zero"
Client should crash, and a .dmp is written to C:\Dumps\

Processing the minidump to produce a stack trace

minidump_stackwalk blah.dmp /symbols/

Issues

Lack of build-id

On Windows, the build-id takes the form of a CodeView record.
This build-id is captured for all modules in the process by MiniDumpWriteDump(),
and is used by the breakpad minidump processing tools to find the matching
symbol file.

See http://debuginfo.com/articles/debuginfomatch.html.

I (Jon Turney) have implemented ld --build-id for PE/COFF executables (See
https://sourceware.org/ml/binutils/2014-01/msg00296.html), but you must use a
sufficently recent version of binutils (2.25 or later) and build with
-Wl,--build-id' (or a GCC configured with --enable-linker-build-id, which
turns that flag on by default) to enable that.

A tool could be written to add a build-id to existing PE/COFF executables, but in
practice this turns out to be quite tricky...

Symbols from a PDB or the Microsoft Symbol Server

symsrv_convert
and dump_syms for PDB cannot be currently built with MinGW,
because

they require the MS DIA (Debug Interface Access) SDK (only in paid
editions of Visual Studio 2013),
the DIA SDK uses ATL.

An alternate PDB parser is available at https://github.com/luser/dump_syms, but
that also needs some work before it can be built with MinGW.

Upstream Breakpad

Homepage: https://chromium.googlesource.com/breakpad/breakpad/
Documentation: https://chromium.googlesource.com/breakpad/breakpad/+/master/docs/
Bugs: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/google-breakpad/
Discussion/Questions: google-breakpad-discuss@googlegroups.com
Developer/Reviews: google-breakpad-dev@googlegroups.com

DaemonEngine/breakpad