[Bug 1006398] Re: Bypassing ptrace restrictions for errors from hanging applications

[Marc Deslauriers]

Yes, that would be a better way of handling it. Apps using standard
toolkits could authorize being debugged by the WM, and that would be
done under the user's context instead of using a privileged process.

I assume the goal is to trace the application while it's looping for a
few seconds before killing it? Will these result in something that is
actually useful for the crash database? If not, just having compiz kill
it should trigger apport in the normal way.

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1006398

Title:
  Bypassing ptrace restrictions for errors from hanging applications

Status in “whoopsie-daisy” package in Ubuntu:
  New

Bug description:
  As part of the error reporting features in 12.10, we're adding the
  ability to generate reports from hanging applications. This requires
  that we can gdb attach and backtrace to an arbitrary PID running as
  the same user, which requires working around the restrictions set by
  the ptrace scope:

  https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Security/Features#ptrace

  A new plugin for compiz will be written to notify a new dbus service
  on the system bus that it should write a gdb backtrace for the pid
  (provided by the _NET_WM_PID xprop. This service will only accept
  connections from the compiz process. It will only accept the request
  if the PID was running with a valid session cookie (unless this is
  overkill?).

  How does that sound?

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