Viewer Crash Reporting

Objectives

• Report all crashes properly (opt-out available)
• Make crash report processing automatic and immediate
• Make crash report data useful

Motivation

Studio Shiny has committed to making the Second Life viewer more stable. This involves finding and fixing viewer crashes. We have found that the existing crash reporter doesn't help us as much as it should. It doesn't always give us the data we need to investigate crash patterns, doesn't scale to SL's current size, doesn't always report a crash, in fact, sometimes the crash reporter itself crashes.

Tasks

Phase 1

• Create central library of crash reporter functionality
• Get near 100% of all crashes reported with the call stack included, which pinpoints the function or method in which the crash occurred.

Phase 2

• Refinements to the crash reporter functionality
  • properly capture crashes before login or viewer initialization

Viewer Crash Hunters

• A team of engineers will utilize the new Viewer Crash Reporter to identify the highest reported crashes and investigate the call stacks to pinpoint bugs.
• The project is gated on the adoption of
  • the 1.19.0.5 viewer which utilizes the new crash reporter.
  • the 1.19.1 viewer which also provides stack info on "deadlocks" (in which a crash occurs, but in a different thread.)
  • implementation TBD of a watchdog process to detect deadlock situation and force a "normal" crash that reports the crashing thread

See Also

• Viewer Roadmap