Category Archives: Bugs

Determinism Bugs, Part Two, Kernel32.dll

Posted on January 6, 2022 by brucedawson

It was literally the day after I cracked the __FILE__ determinism bug that I hit a completely different build determinism issue. I was asked to investigate why the Chrome build number reported for Chrome crashes on Windows 11 was lagging … Continue reading →

Posted in Bugs, Chromium, Computers and Internet, Investigative Reporting, Programming, Symbols | Tagged , , | 19 Comments

Two Deterministic Build Bugs

Posted on January 4, 2022 by brucedawson

‘Twas the week before Christmas and I ran across a deterministic-build bug. And then another one. One was in Chromium, and the other was in Microsoft Windows. It seemed like a weird coincidence so I thought I’d write about both … Continue reading →

Posted in Bugs, Chromium, Computers and Internet, Debugging, Programming | Tagged , , | 14 Comments

Finding Windows HANDLE leaks, in Chromium and others

Posted on July 25, 2021 by brucedawson

Three years ago I found a 32 GB memory leak caused by CcmExec.exe failing to close process handles. That bug is fixed, but ever since then I have had the handles column in  Windows Task Manager enabled, just in case … Continue reading →

Posted in Bugs, Code Reliability, Investigative Reporting, uiforetw, xperf | Tagged , | 20 Comments

The Easy Ones – Three Bugs Hiding in the Open

Posted on August 30, 2020 by brucedawson

I write a lot about investigations into tricky bugs – CPU defects, kernel bugs, transient 4-GB memory allocations – but most bugs are not that esoteric. Sometimes tracking down a bug is as simple as paying attention to server dashboards, … Continue reading →

Posted in Bugs, Code analysis, Code Reliability, Debugging, Floating Point, Linux, Performance | Tagged | 17 Comments

GDI leaks and the importance of luck

Posted on May 10, 2020 by brucedawson

In May 2019 I was asked to look at a potentially serious Chrome bug. I initially misdiagnosed it as unimportant, thus wasting two valuable weeks, and when I rejoined the investigation it was the number one browser-process crash in Chrome’s … Continue reading →

Posted in Bugs, Chromium, Debugging, Programming | Tagged | 25 Comments

Bugs I Got Other Companies to Fix in 2013

Posted on December 31, 2013 by brucedawson

Over the course of a year I fix a lot of bugs – that’s part of my job. But I’m not going to write about that. Instead I want to write about bugs that I found in other companies’ code, … Continue reading →

Posted in Bugs, Programming | Tagged , | 12 Comments

How to Report a VC++ Code-Gen Bug

Posted on October 14, 2013 by brucedawson

My coworkers recently found a bug in the x64 code generated by Visual C++. This bug exists in VC++ 2010 to VC++ 2013 RC. We put in a workaround (the traditional one of disabling optimizations for the afflicted function) and … Continue reading →

Posted in Bugs, Investigative Reporting, Programming, Visual Studio | Tagged , , | 10 Comments

The New WPA Xperf Trace Viewer–New Bugs and Old

Posted on July 26, 2013 by brucedawson

Every Windows performance expert should be using xperf traces. My preferred viewer for xperf traces is WPA – Windows Performance Analyzer. However the Windows 8 version of this tool has a few bugs in its display of custom ETW events. … Continue reading →

Posted in Bugs, xperf | Tagged , , | 3 Comments

Other Causes of Alt+Tab Problems

Posted on June 20, 2013 by brucedawson

Now that I have an easy way to find and fix problems with Alt+Tab it becomes easier to identify culprits. Whenever Alt+Tab misbehaves – whenever the grid of programs goes behind the current Aero Peek window – I run AltTabFixOnce.exe … Continue reading →

Posted in Bugs, Computers and Internet | Tagged , | 5 Comments

Alt+Tab Bug Worsened by IE 10, But Fix Found

Posted on May 28, 2013 by brucedawson

Windows 7 has an annoying bug that causes alt+tab to malfunction for many people. This bug, previously discussed on this blog in Alt+Tab Depth Inversion Bug, causes the grid of programs to be partially or completely hidden, making it much … Continue reading →

Posted in Bugs, Computers and Internet, Investigative Reporting | Tagged , | 64 Comments