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Brave symbol server

Aleksey Khoroshilov edited this page Nov 9, 2023 · 10 revisions

Using Brave symbol server

You can debug Windows release Brave builds or crashdumps using Visual Studio or WinDBG.

The Brave symbol server is located at https://brave-symbols.s3.brave.com/

To setup Visual Studio set this environment variable before running devenv.exe:

set _NT_SYMBOL_PATH=SRV\*C:\symbols\*https://msdl.microsoft.com/download/symbols;SRV\*C:\symbols\*https://brave-symbols.s3.brave.com

Or add https://brave-symbols.s3.brave.com/ via Options dialog: image

Source files downloads

Brave symbols include source server information which allows Visual Studio to automatically download source files from GitHub. This greatly simplifies the debug process as you don't need to have the exact Brave source tree checked-out locally.

To have this work you need to have Python 3 installed and have py launcher be in your PATH.

The download is triggered by Visual Studio when a call stack frame is opened. One time per PDB you will see a security dialog asking you to execute a command:

image

The command in this example look like this:

cmd /c "mkdir "C:\Users\user\AppData\Local\SOURCE~1\base\task\thread_pool\worker_thread.cc\84eb7c6e8a38b0e65b14f75cfec8144ffbc4b359" & py -3 -c "import urllib.request, base64;url = \"https://raw.githubusercontent.com/brave/chromium/84eb7c6e8a38b0e65b14f75cfec8144ffbc4b359/base/task/thread_pool/worker_thread.cc\";u = urllib.request.urlopen(url);open(r\"C:\Users\user\AppData\Local\SOURCE~1\base\task\thread_pool\worker_thread.cc\84eb7c6e8a38b0e65b14f75cfec8144ffbc4b359\worker_thread.cc\", \"wb\").write((u.read()))"

If you trust this, feel free to:

  1. Choose "Trust commands from this symbol file"
  2. Press "Run".

Visual Studio will download symbols and display the exact source location as usual.

PGO and other Release optimizations

Please have in mind that Brave is built with Profile Guided Optimizations and other optimizations which may change the code flow substantially, and even having all symbols the execution during debugger steps might look weird.

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