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:
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:
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:
- Choose "Trust commands from this symbol file"
- Press "Run".
Visual Studio will download symbols and display the exact source location as usual.
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.