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Please support adding crash metadata as extra stream #214
Description
I would be useful to crash metadata as extra stream to the minidump file. My proposal is to use a flexible format like BSON for it and declare common key, value pairs. Example keys:
- Date
- Distribution
- Architecture
- Package
- /proc/cmdline
- Uname
This way Linux distribution could use it to collect additional information, but the format is flexible enough to be adapted to other use cases.
Activity
gabrielesvelto commentedon Aug 21, 2026
You might want to check out how Google Crashpad does it. We've got a pull request that I haven't merged yet to surface that information in rust-minidump. If that works for you we could add support for that.
Also keep in mind that some of the information you're looking for is already in the minidump, in particular:
/proc/cmdlineare in theLinuxCmdLinestreamLinuxLsbReleasestreamSystemInfoStreamstreamTry using
minidump-stackwalk --dumporminidump-stackwalk --jsonto inspect the full contents of 6EE9 a Linux minidump. What you're looking for might already be there.bdrung commentedon Aug 21, 2026
To give some background information: I discussed the idea with @schopin-mozilla to change Apport (Ubuntu's crash dumper) to use minidump. Apport collects the crash, metadata like I mentioned, package information, and has a hook infrastructure to collect more information (like config setting, config files, locale, Desktop env, etc).
gabrielesvelto commentedon Aug 26, 2026
Yes, this is something we definitely want to do. In Firefox we collect this information in a separate file (.extra, what the code in rust-minidump calls "evil JSON") but we'd like that info to live in the minidump instead.