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1. backtalk Project

1.1. Abstract

Once upon a time, people wrote the software themselves. When they get a crash, they debugged it and sent the information to developers, or even they fixed it. And it was Good. Then we got more non-hacker users that compiled the software themselves and they still got crashed, so we wrote tools for sending automatically debug information to developers. And it was Good. Now, most of users install a vendor based OSS distribution, optimized and without debugging symbols, so our automatically debug info collecting tools, as bug-buddy+gdb, became useless. Even more, they now don't install gdb. And this is bad. So the backtalk project tries to create a full infrastructure to solve this. It is based on a client/server structure: a client library to catch crashes or invoked by demand, collecting as much information from obscure but known binaries (libraries and executables from a know vendor, with a know md5 signature), and then sending to the appropriate "debugging" server. The server side identifies right libs and and executable and populates the memory dump with debug symbols, providing an useful stack trace and information about the state.

Resources

Helping

We don't have any mailing list yet, neither code, just prototyping, so feel free to add your stuff here.


2024-10-23 10:58