crashpad

Crashpad is an open-source crash-reporting system designed to collect and upload crash reports from software. It was developed by Google as a successor to Breakpad and is used by Chromium-based projects. The system is cross-platform, supporting Windows, macOS, and Linux, and is designed to minimize impact on the crashed process by performing crash-dump collection in a separate process.

The client includes a library that applications link against and a crashpad_handler process that runs to generate and save crash reports. Reports typically include a stack trace, process and thread information, and optional developer annotations. Crash reports can be stored locally and uploaded to a crash server when network connectivity is available. The project emphasizes configurability and privacy, allowing teams to control what data is collected and when it is sent.

Crashpad originated as a modern rewrite of Breakpad to improve reliability and maintainability. It became the crash-reporting backend for Google Chrome and other Chromium components, helping to standardize crash data collection across platforms. The project is maintained as an open-source repository on GitHub.

In use, Crashpad integrates with server-side pipelines that receive, de-duplicate, and analyze crash data, providing developers with diagnostic information to fix issues more efficiently. It is one of several crash-reporting ecosystems used in large-scale software, with alternatives including Breakpad and other analytics tools.