breakpad/docs/exception_handling.md

The goal of this document is to give an overview of the exception handling options in breakpad.

Basics

Exception handling is a mechanism designed to handle the occurrence of exceptions, special conditions that change the normal flow of program execution.

SetUnhandledExceptionFilter replaces all unhandled exceptions when Breakpad is enabled. TODO: More on first and second change and vectored v. try/catch.

There are two main types of exceptions across all platforms: in-process and out-of-process.

In-Process

In process exception handling is relatively simple since the crashing process handles crash reporting. It is generally considered unsafe to write a minidump from a crashed process. For example, key data structures could be corrupted or the stack on which the exception handler runs could have been overwritten. For this reason all platforms also support some level of out-of-process exception handling.

Windows

In-process exception handling Breakpad creates a 'handler head' that waits infinitely on a semaphore at start up. When this thread is woken it writes the minidump and signals to the excepting thread that it may continue. A filter will tell the OS to kill the process if the minidump is written successfully. Otherwise it continues.

Out-of-Process

Out-of-process exception handling is more complicated than in-process exception handling because of the need to set up a separate process that can read the state of the crashing process.

Windows

Breakpad uses two abstractions around the exception handler to make things work: CrashGenerationServer and CrashGenerationClient. The constructor for these takes a named pipe name.

During server start up a named pipe and registers callbacks for client connections are created. The named pipe is used for registration and all IO on the pipe is done asynchronously. OnPipeConnected is called when a client attempts to connect (call CreateFile on the pipe). OnPipeConnected does the state machine transition from Initial to Connecting and on through Reading, Reading_Done, Writing, Writing_Done, Reading_ACK, and Disconnecting.

When registering callbacks, the client passes in two pointers to pointers: 1. A pointer to the EXCEPTION_INFO pointer 1. A pointer to the MDRawAssertionInfo which handles various non-exception failures like assertions

The essence of registration is adding a "ClientInfo" object that contains handles used for synchronization with the crashing process to an array maintained by the server. This is how we can keep track of all the clients on the system that have registered for minidumps. These handles are: * server_died(mutex) * dump_requested(Event) * dump_generated(Event)

The server registers asynchronous waits on these events with the ClientInfo object as the callback context. When the dump_requested event is set by the client, the OnDumpRequested() callback is called. The server uses the handles inside ClientInfo to communicate with the child process. Once the child sets the event, it waits for two objects: 1. the dump_generated event 1. the server_died mutex

In the end handles are "duped" into the client process, and the clients use SetEvent to request events, wait on the other event, or the server_died mutex.

Linux

Current Status

As of July 2011, Linux had a minidump generator that is not entirely out-of-process. The minidump was generated from a separate process, but one that shared an address space, file descriptors, signal handles and much else with the crashing process. It worked by using the clone() system call to duplicate the crashing process, and then uses ptrace() and the /proc file system to retrieve the information required to write the minidump. Since then Breakpad has updated Linux exception handling to provide more benefits of out-of-process report generation.

Proposed Design

Overview

Breakpad would use a per-user daemon to write out a minidump that does not have, interact with or depend on the crashing process. We don't want to start a new separate process every time a user launches a Breakpad-enabled process. Doing one daemon per machine is unacceptable for security concerns around one user being able to initiate a minidump generation for another user's process.

Client/Server Communication

On Breakpad initialization in a process, the initializer would check if the daemon is running and, if not, start it. The race condition between the check and the initialization is not a problem because multiple daemons can check if the IPC endpoint already exists and if a server is listening. Even if multiple copies of the daemon try to bind() the filesystem to name the socket, all but one will fail and can terminate.

This point is relevant for error handling conditions. Linux does not clean the file system representation of a UNIX domain socket even if both endpoints terminate, so checking for existence is not strong enough. However checking the process list or sending a ping on the socket can handle this.

Breakpad uses UNIX domain sockets since they support full duplex communication (unlike Windows, named pipes on Linux are half) and the kernal automatically creates a private channel between the client and server once the client calls connect().

Minidump Generation

Breakpad could use the current system with ptrace() and /proc within the daemon executable.

Overall the operations look like: 1. Signal from OS indicating crash 1. Signal Handler suspends all threads except itself 1. Signal Handler sends CRASH_DUMP_REQUEST message to server and waits for response 1. Server inspects

1. Minidump is asynchronously written to disk by the server 1. Server responds indicating inspection is done

Mac OSX

Out-of-process exception handling is fully supported on Mac.