Sentry gets improved crash reporting for games running via Proton / Wine on SteamOS / Linux

Sentry is a toolkit for game devs to monitor errors, performance and more and now it should work a lot better on Linux / SteamOS with Wine / Proton. While the Sentry developers discovered the issues on SteamOS due to games running on Steam Deck, their improvements apply to Linux as a whole for any compatibility layer based on Wine / Proton.

What happened? They detailed in a recent blog post how a game developer sent in a support ticket to note they were getting no information from crashes on Steam Decks. Sentry developers realised it worked fine in Linux builds, but not in Windows games running through Proton.

Strangely they saw that non-fatal errors worked just fine and the logs were all sent. The problem with crashes, they ended up figuring out was that each crash dump was over 500mb whereas a typical Windows crash dump would be "50-80 KB" and so "Something was catastrophically wrong" they said. This is far over their size limit for what was being sent, and it makes sense, imagine the Sentry systems getting sent tons of large packages like that - it would cause problems fast.

It all gets a bit technical from there, talking about capturing memory and leading onto finding an issue with Wine (which Proton is based on). Not a bug in Wine though, just part of how it works that led to this issue. As a result, they made multiple improvements to their system to account for it and they're now detecting Wine / Proton automatically in their SDK for game developers. And, as a bonus, developers can actually track Wine / Proton issues separately which sounds rather useful.

They said the fix is already in their Unreal Engine SDK and their own Sentry Native SDK for custom game engines, and it's coming soon for Unity and Godot SDKs. Side-note: Sentry also recently started sponsoring Godot too.

Pretty cool to see how SteamOS on the Steam Deck is having such a wide effect across the industry, leading to all sorts of toolkits getting better overall Linux support. Long may it continue.