[Impact]
Crash reports with damaged core dumps are being sent to the Ubuntu Error Tracker, where they are added to the retracing queue and then an attempt is made to retrace them. These retraces fail because the core dump is damaged so resources are wasted. We should stop sending these to the Error Tracker.
[Test Case]
apport's test_report.py has gained a new test called test_add_gdb_info_damaged which tests that a crash report with a damaged core dump raises an IOError.
Running this test with the version of the package in trusty-updates will fail with an AssertionError.
Running the test with the version of the package from trusty-proposed will pass.
I was trying to investigate a failed retrace on armhf and received the following when running apport-retrace with -g.
Calling gdb command: gdb-multiarch --ex 'set architecture arm' --ex 'set gnutarget elf32-littlearm' --ex 'set debug-file-directory /tmp/apport
-utopic/usr/lib/debug' --ex 'set solib-absolute-prefix /tmp/apport-utopic' --ex 'file "/tmp/apport-utopic//usr/lib/ubuntu-push-client/signing-
helper"' --ex 'core-file /tmp/apport_core_36z3Va'
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The target architecture is assumed to be arm
Reading symbols from /tmp/apport-utopic//usr/lib/ubuntu-push-client/signing-helper...Reading symbols from /tmp/apport-utopic/usr/lib/debug/.bu
ild-id/0d/28e75c6b9149132f8940077618a904989a75ed.debug...done.
done.
BFD: Warning: /tmp/apport_core_36z3Va is truncated: expected core file size >= 19316736, found: 9502720.
[New LWP 15327]
[New LWP 15530]
[New LWP 15321]
Cannot access memory at address 0xb6fa7948
Cannot access memory at address 0xb6fa7944
When running apport-retrace with -o, a new crash file is created with a broken Stacktrace. This makes sense given that the core file is corrupt.
However, I think apport-retrace should do something different here, as you have no idea why the retraced report is bad. Maybe it should write a RetraceFailure key to the report, not write the report at all, or just exit with an error regarding the core file size difference.
This problem exists in apport/report.py:
part_re = re.compile(
parts = part_re.split(out)
# drop the gdb startup text prior to first separator
for part in parts:
Using the relevant core file we see the warning in parts[0].
ipdb> parts[0]
u'The target architecture is assumed to be arm\nBFD: Warning: /tmp/apport_