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Reporting ChromeOS bugs

Chromebook Help Community

The Chromebook Help Community is an active, searchable community for user discussion of bugs and feature requests. It's a great place to ask for help, and there's a good chance that your question has already been asked (and answered, hopefully).

Feedback reports

Feedback reports are the primary mechanism by which ChromeOS users can send feedback about the project. Reports are clustered into categories that are used to identify larger issues, but they are typically not individually reviewed. Submitted reports are not publicly accessible.

To submit a feedback report, type Alt+Shift+i or click Report an issue... within the Help submenu while logged in. Feedback reports include selected system logs if the Send system and app information, and metrics checkbox is checked. You can click the links within the checkbox text to see the information that will be attached to the report. See the official feedback documentation for more information.

Public issue tracker

The Chromium project's public trackers are used to track ChromeOS bugs and feature requests.

If you have a bug or feature request which is related to the ChromeOS operating system itself and not the user interface or browser, please proceed to the instructions on filing bugs in ChromeOS in the ChromeOS Issue Tracker.

If you have a bug or feature request which is related to the user interface or browser, please file it using the Chromium project's public issue tracker. new.crbug.com or crbug.com/new are interchangeable handy shortcuts that can be used to start a new issue in this public tracker. Issues are publicly-viewable by default, but the Restrict-View-Google label restricts the issue to Google employees. go/newcrosbug (internal link) may be used to start a new issue with this label.

New issues submitted to these trackers are periodically triaged to receive correct component assignments, at which point they should be examined by component owners. If you are a Chromium project member or a member of Chrome OS, you can assign components and other labels/hotlists yourself to expedite this process.

Security bugs

If you want to report a security bug, please head over to Bughunters.

That covers how to securely and privately report issues to the right group. ChromeOS Security is no longer using the public issue tracker for ChromeOS security bugs. Moreover, please do not use the default crbug.com/new system. That will fail to reach the right people, and it also creates public bugs that anyone can view.

The Bughunters rules cover all the details of which ChromeOS bugs are considered security vulnerabilities. Note that while the Chrome browser does not consider physically-local attacks to be inside its threat model, ChromeOS does include certain physically-local attacks in its threat model. The reason for this difference is that while the Chrome browser does not control the operating system it runs on, on ChromeOS we are responsible for the entire system. This means that ChromeOS does need to protect against certain physically-local attackers, such as at the lock screen. See the ChromeOS Security Severity Guidelines for more details.

Also note that we do not handle account compromises with your Google account (e.g. someone stole your Gmail password). Please see the Google Account Help document and related articles instead.

Collecting full debug logs

It is also possible to collect more extensive system logs beyond what is included in feedback reports. Frequently this is not necessary, so check with a developer first.

  1. Navigate to chrome://network/#logs
  2. Include the system_logs.txt file is checked by default, we encourage including that because many tools can parse that format. (It is the same file that gets sent to feedback reports).
    • PII is stripped by default. Uncheck this if PII data like network names is needed for debugging, but see the PII notes below.
  3. Check Include a policies.json file if policy information is relevant (and see PII notes below).
  4. Check Include all log files collected by debugd to include additional logs as a separate archive.
    • Also Check Include Chrome logs if the complete Chrome log file is needed. A truncated log will be included in system_logs.txt.
    • This file can be quite large and may take a while to generate.
    • These log files will not be stripped of any PII.
  5. Click on the 'Store system logs' button.

All files will be saved to the Downloads folder.

If logs with PII (personally identifiable information) are included, you may want to do one or more of the following:

Taking screenshots

Screenshots are extremely helpful when debugging UI-related issues. To capture a screenshot on a ChromeOS device, hold Ctrl and hit the Switch Window (a.k.a. [ ]]]) key (or F5 if you're using a non-ChromeOS keyboard). The screenshot will be written to your Downloads folder if you're logged in or to /tmp (which can be accessed by browsing to file:///tmp after logging in) if captured at the login screen. To take a screenshot of a limited region of the screen, use Ctrl+Shift+Switch Window and drag a rectangle using the touchpad.

Crash reports

When the Chrome process, some other system process, or the Linux kernel crashes, a crash report will be generated and sent if the Automatically send diagnostic and usage data to Google setting is enabled. When this happens, you should later be able to see information about the report at chrome://crashes, including:

If you give the ID to a ChromeOS developer, they can look up more details about the report that will hopefully help them determine the crash's cause.

Reporting system hangs

If the entire UI (including the cursor) freezes or hangs, it can indicate various problems, including:

If you see a freeze, try pressing Alt+Volume Up+X once, with the keys depressed in that order. (If you're using a non-ChromeOS keyboard, use Alt+F10+X instead.) This will instruct the Linux kernel to attempt to make the Chrome process crash and restart.

If that doesn't help, try pressing the three-key-combination two more times. This should trigger a kernel panic, resulting in the system rebooting.

If the system is still frozen, you've probably encountered a lower-level issue. Holding the power button for eight seconds should force a reboot.

If you were able to trigger a Chrome crash or kernel panic, you may be able to find the crash ID at chrome://crashes after logging in again. Full debug logs may also contain more information about what went wrong.

Recommendations for reporting bugs

If you think you've identified a bug in ChromeOS, please do the following:

  1. Search the public issue tracker to see if the bug has already been reported. If it has, you can click the star icon at the top-left corner of the page to indicate that you're also affected by the issue and receive email notifications whenever it's updated. If you have additional information you think might help resolve the issue, feel free to add it, but please do not add "+1" or "Me too" comments -- just click the star icon.
  2. If you're able to consistently reproduce the bug or if you regularly see it, hit Alt+Shift+i to send a feedback report immediately after seeing it. Write a short description of the problem in the text field and make sure that the Send system and app information, and metrics checkbox is checked before sending the report. Sending system information allows developers to view logs; this is almost always necessary in order to investigate bug reports. (If an issue is already tracking the bug, please include its ID in the feedback report's description and add a comment to the issue mentioning that you've submitted feedback).
  3. Go to new.crbug.com and create a new issue. Include as much information as you can about the bug and what was happening when you experienced it. If you were able to submit a feedback report, please mention that in the issue, along with the approximate time at which the bug occurred and the account that you used to submit the feedback report (if it differs from the account you're using to report the issue). Please attach any relevant screenshots or crash IDs, too.
  4. You'll receive email notifications when your issue is updated. If a developer asks for additional information about the bug, please supply it. The developer may ask you to provide debug logs that you collected previously.