Wednesday, August 26, 2009

Firefox-3.5 debugging problem on Ubuntu9.04

I and my colleague Xinshu are working on Firefox-3.5 web browser and from last few months since Firefox-3.5 is released we were searching for how to debug Firefox-3.5 with gdb on ubuntu v9.04. We are able to debug Firefox-3.0 with gdb on ubuntu v9.04, but we were not be able to debug Firefox-3.5. Whenever we tried to debug Firefox-3.5 with gdb debugger, GDB sometimes terminated by giving "Segmentation Fault" error , or sometimes terminated by giving memory leak error. So we developed a wrong impression that Firefox-3.5 cannot be debug with gdb in Ubuntu v9.04, because official version of Firefox-3.5 for ubuntu is not yet released. Ubuntu has Firefox v3.0.13 in its repository. However for Fedora and Windows, Firefox v3.5.2 is available. We searched on many blogs/forums, etc for the solution or does somebody faced/facing the same problem as we do. Many of them misdirected by saying some package is missing on your machine, which is required for Firefox-3.5 to debug on Ubuntu v9.04. We installed all the packages named on those forums, but had no luck, till today.
My colleague (Xinshu) finally discovered the caused of error. And the solution was very simple, but not convenient for users who has many Firefox profiles for different purpose .
When we looked into terminal window, we found that GDB terminated after Firefox creates a new process. And new process is created when you have multiple profiles on your system, and selecting the one out of them each time Firefox starts, was the source of error. Firefox creates a new process whenever we select the profile.
So we tried by deleting all profiles, and it was miracle, it really worked. The solution is very simple, delete all Firefox profiles and then try Firefox-3.5 to debug with GDB on Ubuntu. It works!.
Although it is not convenient to users who have many profiles.

2 comments:

  1. How about other linux OS, like Fedora? Do they have similar problems?

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  2. To issac: No, I am able to debug Firefox-3.5 with GDB on Fedora.

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