Category Archives: Debugging

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

Creating a Public Symbol Server, Easily

Posted on March 14, 2020 by brucedawson

I’ve been a big fan of symbol servers for years. They are a part of the Microsoft/Windows ecosystem that is far better than anything I have seen for other operating systems. With Microsoft’s and Chrome’s symbol servers configured I can … Continue reading →

Posted in Debugging, Programming, Symbols, uiforetw | Tagged | 15 Comments

Compiler bug? Linker bug? Windows Kernel bug.

Posted on February 25, 2018 by brucedawson

See the end of the post for an October 2018 bug fix update, or read the whole story: Flaky failures are the worst. In this particular investigation, which spanned twenty months, we suspected hardware failure, compiler bugs, linker bugs, and … Continue reading →

Posted in Debugging, Investigative Reporting, Programming | Tagged , , , | 57 Comments

Zombie Processes are Eating your Memory

Posted on February 11, 2018 by brucedawson

Zombies probably won’t consume 32 GB of your memory like they did to me, but zombie processes do exist, and I can help you find them and make sure that developers fix them. Tool source link is at the bottom. … Continue reading →

Posted in Debugging, Investigative Reporting, Performance, Programming, Rants | Tagged , , | 72 Comments

Finding a CPU Design Bug in the Xbox 360

Posted on January 7, 2018 by brucedawson

The recent reveal of Meltdown and Spectre reminded me of the time I found a related design bug in the Xbox 360 CPU – a newly added instruction whose mere existence was dangerous. Back in 2005 I was the Xbox … Continue reading →

Posted in Debugging | Tagged , , , , | 49 Comments

Analyzing a Confusing Crash–Stack Walks Gone Bad

Posted on December 10, 2017 by brucedawson

Part of my job always seems to include crash analysis. A program crashes on a customer’s machine, a minidump is uploaded to the cloud, and it might be my desk that it appears on when Monday morning rolls around. The … Continue reading →

Posted in Debugging | Tagged , | 8 Comments

Everything Old is New Again, and a Compiler Bug

Posted on September 16, 2016 by brucedawson

“What’s an EXCEPTION_FLT_STACK_CHECK exception?” one of my coworkers said. I said “It’s a weird and rare crash. Why do you ask?” It turns out that one of these weird and rare crashes had started showing up in Chrome (M54 branch, … Continue reading →

Posted in Debugging, Floating Point | Tagged | 26 Comments

Thread Naming in Windows: Time for Something Better

Posted on October 26, 2015 by brucedawson

Windows lets you give names to the threads in your process which can then be displayed by debuggers. This is a great idea, but the implementation is showing its age – it’s time for some fixes, or something better. Update, … Continue reading →

Posted in Debugging, Programming, Visual Studio | Tagged , , , | 16 Comments