Crash reporting

Enable crash reporting

Omaha client has built-in ability to send crash reports to the server. The requirements are the following:

• Make release build of Omaha
• Allow client to gather usage stats (usagestats=1 in metainstaller tag)
• Make sure there is no TestSource key under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\{OmahaCompanyName}\UpdateDev registry path

Crash reporting will be enabled if all the requirements above are satisfied. However, developers can override this behavior for test purposes by setting AlwaysAllowCrashUploads to 1 under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\{OmahaCompanyName}\UpdateDev registry path. In this case crashes will always be uploaded regardless of any unsatisfied requirements above.

Crash dump generating strategies

Omaha client uses Google Breakpad for generating crash dumps. It has two dump generating strategies: in-process and out-of-process.
The client uses in-process strategy for generating dumps in case of self crashes and out-of-process strategy for generating dumps for other applications crashes. The name of the named pipe used for OOP dump generating can be found in Crash::StartServer() function inside goopdate\crash.cc
For more information refer to Breakpad documentation.