Symbols for Windows graphics drivers now available

[Gabriele Svelto]

[cross-posting to stability]

Hello all,
starting from tomorrow crashes involving Windows graphics drivers (from
Intel, AMD and NVidia) should get actual symbols instead of just the DLL
name. The symbols will be scraped every 24h so new crash signatures
should become visible within a day.

The stack traces of said crashes will be much improved because proper
CFI-based stack-walking will be used instead of heuristics. This is a
good example of a crash that has already been reprocessed using the new
symbols:

https://crash-stats.mozilla.org/report/index/68a9a87c-4288-477b-9384-671ad0201106

This system still has a few limitations though:

- Only the public symbols present in the DLLs are available so you won't
be able to see private function names. In case a public name is too
generic to tell crashes apart you can request to add it to the prefix
list on Socorro [2].

- Not all DLLs from the drivers are present on the vendor's symbol
servers. If some version is missing (say from a WHQL driver) please open
a bug in the "Toolkit::Crash Reporting" component [3]. I'll try to get
in touch with the relevant vendor to have them upload the symbols.

- Symbols from very old drivers might just not be available (think 2+
years old). This will mostly be non-WHQL ones, symbols from WHQL drivers
should always be available.

Gabriele

[1] Scrape symbol files for Windows graphics drivers
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1655476
[2]
https://socorro.readthedocs.io/en/latest/signaturegeneration.html#how-to-request-a-change-to-signature-generation
[3]
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/describecomponents.cgi?product=Toolkit&component=Crash%20Reporting#Crash%20Reporting

[Jeff Muizelaar]

This is great. I'm looking forward to the improved crash signatures.

Thanks,

-Jeff

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