A while ago a colleague of mine asked about our crash infrastructure in Plasma and whether I could give some overview on it. This seems very useful to others as well, I thought. Here I am, telling you all about it!

Our crash infrastructure is comprised of a number of different components.

• KCrash: a KDE Framework performing crash interception and prepartion for handover to…
• coredumpd: a systemd component performing process core collection and handover to…
• DrKonqi: a GUI for crashes sending data to…
• Sentry: a web service and UI for tracing and presenting crashes for developers

We’ve already looked at KCrash and coredumpd. Now it is time to look at DrKonqi.

Read More

A while ago a colleague of mine asked about our crash infrastructure in Plasma and whether I could give some overview on it. This seems very useful to others as well, I thought. Here I am, telling you all about it!

Our crash infrastructure is comprised of a number of different components.

• KCrash: a KDE Framework performing crash interception and prepartion for handover to…
• coredumpd: a systemd component performing process core collection and handover to…
• DrKonqi: a GUI for crashes sending data to…
• Sentry: a web service and UI for tracing and presenting crashes for developers

We’ve looked at KCrash previously. This time we look at coredumpd.

Read More

A while ago a colleague of mine asked about our crash infrastructure in Plasma and whether I could give some overview on it. This seems very useful to others as well, I thought. Here I am, telling you all about it!

Our crash infrastructure is comprised of a number of different components.

• KCrash: a KDE Framework performing crash interception and prepartion for handover to…
• coredumpd: a systemd component performing process core collection and handover to…
• DrKonqi: a GUI for crashes sending data to…
• Sentry: a web service and UI for tracing and presenting crashes for developers

We will look at them in turn. This post introduces KCrash.

Read More

The other day I had to dive into the ksmserver code, the core of session management in KDE Plasma, but found it all a bit difficult to read. If only I could get a callgraph I thought… Turns out it actually is possible! In fact it is almost too easy with clang/llvm. There are already solutions that attach LLVM bitcode to existing binaries. e.g. gllvm. gllvm basically is a shim sitting between ninja and the actual compiler and injects some behavior for us. Read More

For a while now DrKonqi has a special developer notification system when used in combination with coredumpd. I just realized I never told anyone about it 😅 though. It’s terribly simple: When used with coredumpd, parts of DrKonqi implicitly look at all crashes that pertain to your current user. Because of that it can also notify on all crashes, not just the KDE-related ones. Obviously it can’t report bugs or anything but sometimes, as a developer, it’s nice to know when things explode. Read More

The other week the question came up how one can debug an application crash when the Windows Store crash tracking system is unable to produce a usable stack trace. Seemed a good enough opportunity to share some wisdom :) Generally speaking in order to get a stack trace you first need a minidump. minidumps are kind of like core dumps on POSIX systems, well, except, mini. Acquiring that is should be your first goal. Read More

…very hard. KDE relies heavily on web services, and many of them need to be kept responsive even under strenuous load. I’ve recently had the opportunity to spend some time on load testing one of our websites and would like to share how that worked out. To properly test things I wanted to have multiple computers make concurrent requests to the service and ensure that the service still performs within acceptable limits. Read More

People keep lamenting how lackluster Qt’s SVG renderer is. It leads to poorly rendered icons and wallpapers and it mostly only implements the SVG Tiny specification. As a weekend project I put together a resvg based image handler replacement. It was super easy because resvg is amazing! The Plugins An application that uses QSvgRenderer actually can, for the most part, just use resvg’s Qt header and call it a day. It has a very convenient interface that lets you replace most uses of QSvgRenderer with resvg’s. Read More

At KDE we make software for many different platforms. One of them is Microsoft Windows. But what if an application crashes on Windows? New tech enables us to track crashes right in Sentry! Time to learn about it. When an application crashes on Windows the user can submit crash data to Microsoft. Later KDE, as publisher of the app, can retrieve the crashes from there. This is the standard crash handling for the platform and it works incredibly well. Read More

Every once in a while I hear developers having trouble staying up to date with KDE Discuss(ions). No great surprise when I then find out they aren’t tracking things (in other words: not subscribed to categories)! Discourse, the software that powers KDE Discuss, has a number of handy notifications settings that we can use to have the software bring posts to us instead of having to go to the website every once in a while. Read More