Category Archives: Chromium

Compiler Tricks to Avoid ABI-Induced Crashes

Posted on December 14, 2022 by brucedawson

Last month I wrote about an odd crash that was hitting a few Chrome users. Something was corrupting the XMM7 register and that was causing Chrome to crash. We fixed a couple of bugs in Chrome and we were able … Continue reading →

Posted in Chromium, Debugging, Investigative Reporting, Symbols | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

Please Restore Our Registers When You’re Done With Them

Posted on November 21, 2022 by brucedawson

“Hey, you. Yes you, that function over there. When you’re cleaning up please remember to restore all of my registers. Yes, that one too – what do you think this is, Linux?” That’s the problem I was dealing with in … Continue reading →

Posted in Chromium, Debugging, Investigative Reporting, Symbols | Tagged , , | 25 Comments

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

Floating Point in the Browser, Part 3: When x+y=x (y != 0)

Posted on October 18, 2020 by brucedawson

A few years ago I did a lot of thinking and writing about floating-point math. It was good fun, and I learned a lot in the process, but sometimes I go a long time without actually using that hard-earned knowledge. … Continue reading →

Posted in Chromium, Computers and Internet, Floating Point | Tagged , | 5 Comments

Floating Point in the Browser, Part 2: Bad Epsilon

Posted on October 11, 2020 by brucedawson

A few years ago I did a lot of thinking and writing about floating-point math. It was good fun, and I learned a lot in the process, but sometimes I go a long time without actually using that hard-earned knowledge. … Continue reading →

Posted in Chromium, Computers and Internet, Floating Point | Tagged , | 2 Comments

Floating Point in the Browser, Part 1: Impossible Expectations

Posted on September 27, 2020 by brucedawson

A few years ago I did a lot of thinking and writing about floating-point math. It was good fun, and I learned a lot in the process, but sometimes I go a long time without actually using that hard-earned knowledge. … Continue reading →

Posted in Chromium, Computers and Internet, Floating Point | Tagged , | 21 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

Big Project Build Times–Chromium

Posted on March 30, 2020 by brucedawson

A twitter discussion on build times and source-file sizes got me interested in doing some analysis of Chromium build times. I had some ideas about what I would find (lots of small source files causing much of the build time) … Continue reading →

Posted in Chromium, Performance, Programming | Tagged , | 23 Comments