Should RStudio install a SIGSEGV handler?

[t-kalinowski]

I think that most segmentation faults that users experience are confined to rsession. Perhaps RStudio could install a signal handler that just gracefully restarts the R session on a segfault, instead of crashing the full IDE?

An almost too-good-to-be-true feature would be if the signal handler did something more, like attach to the rsession with lldb/gdb and print a traceback before restarting, or give an option to drop into the gdb console. This might be as simple as sending a command to terminal like lldb -p <rsession pid>

[jeffvroom]

Great suggestions, thanks for filing that. We should be offering an option to restart rsession on SEGV. Launching gdb or lldb would be nice to have, or maybe there's a way to have the user direct it to save a core file? The stack is way more useful once we have added back symbols.

In the meantime, to be sure everyone is aware, there is already a signal handler for SEGV that is installed when /etc/rstudio/crash-handler.conf has the enabled flag. Here's how I configure it:

crash-handling-enabled=1
crash-db-path=/tmp/crash-dumps
uploads-enabled=0

The minidump files generated can be turned into stack traces with symbols given the exact build number.