debugging in Linux Created 6 years ago2017-11-04 07:36:37 UTC by tschumann

Anyone worked out to how to debug crashes for a mod in Linux? It looks like Steam uses google-breakpad so won't generate gdb core dumps (though it used to maybe: http://steamcommunity.com/app/221410/discussions/0/540743757387624740/).
The problem then is that gdb doesn't load minidumps. There is a minidump-2-core utility in google-breakpad but as far as I can see there is no Ubuntu mirror for it, so I'd have to clone and build myself (which I'd like to avoid).

According to the breakpad documentation there's a tool to convert the minidumps to a human readable format:
[quote]

The client is a library that you include in your application. It can write minidump files capturing the current threads' state and the identities of the currently loaded executable and shared libraries. You can configure the client to write a minidump when a crash occurs, or when explicitly requested.

The symbol dumper is a program that reads the debugging information produced by the compiler and produces a symbol file, in Breakpad's own format.

The processor is a program that reads a minidump file, finds the appropriate symbol files for the versions of the executables and shared libraries the minidump mentions, and produces a human-readable C/C++ stack trace.

[/quote]

From https://github.com/google/breakpad/blob/master/docs/getting_started_with_breakpad.md

I suggest you try to use this processor tool to get the information you need.

I guess that's similar to converting the minidump to a core dump so I'd have to build breakpad to do that.
Is there not a way to get Half-Life to generate a core dump?

If breakpad is pre-empting core dumps then i doubt it, otherwise you should consult the documentation for core dump generation to see if there's anything that can be done to force it.

Is there any particular reason why you can't build the tools yourself?

Just trying to keep things simple.

It was a little effort to get breakpad to compile (I've made some notes at https://github.com/tschumann/sandbot/blob/v0.4.1.1/notes.txt - wasn't too easy to search for) - just need to figure out how to get it into gdb now. The minidump is for hl_linux and from the small amount of fiddling I did I couldn't get symbols to load.