2.5 KiB
This small note to describe how a windows developer can inject minidump files generated from a crash of a game running under Proton Steam (desktop or Deck).
Note: this doesn't apply if the application is running managed code as it's required more compabilities between .NET and Mono. So, from now on, we only consider native (non managed) code.
These minidumps are fully reloadable under Microsoft tools (WinDbg or Visual Studio) when the binaries of the Proton system files are made available to the debugging tool. It's mandatory for reloading a minidump created with a given Proton version that the very same Proton system files are made avaiable to the machine running the debugging tool.
If the right version is not installed, the debugging tool will likely emit warnings (like "couldn't match module", or "invalid time stamp"). This means the debugging tool will report likely bogus information, and your setup must be fixed before going any further.
Installing on dev machine
Each new released proton version (starting at Proton 8.0-4) will also be available as a zip package to be installed inside symbol store.
The .zip file is available as a part of GitHub release and is named <BUILD_NAME>-symstore.zip.
You must create a top directory (referred as below) and extract the zip file with as the parent directory.
Each time a new Proton's version is released, this extraction scheme has to be done in order to have proper access to minidumps generated from this Proton version.
Setting up the debugging tools
WinDbg
In the WinDbg "File > Settings" menu, in the "Symbols path" pane, add
srv*<SYMSTORE>
Of course, one can add also the paths to the application being debugged.
Visual Studio
In Visual Studio:
- Open the minidump from the "File > Open > File" menu
- Open the "Set Symbol paths" item, and add a (.pdb) store pointing to
- Depending on your project settings, you could also have another store pointing to your own application
- Then start debugging by using the "Debug with..." appropriate to your project.
Other debugging tool
If the tool supports symbol stores, then there's should be a similar configuration as described above for MS tools.
[[ Note: the settings above should work also if we're able to generate .pdb files along side the images ]]
Public store
A Proton symbol store is available at https://proton-archive.steamos.cloud/.
Then no local installation is required, only setting the
srv*<SYMSTORE_URI>
in the debugging tools would be required.