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Category Archives: Debugging
When Debug Symbols Get Large
TL;DR – upgrade your tools, including Visual Studio, windbg, and Windows Performance Toolkit, if you want to handle Chromium’s symbol files. Details: Death, taxes, and browser engines relentlessly growing – those are the three things that you can really be … Continue reading
No Start Menu for You
I tend to launch most programs on my Windows 10 laptop by typing the <Win> key, then a few letters of the program name, and then hitting enter. On my powerful laptop (SSD and 32 GB of RAM) this process … Continue reading
Posted in Code Reliability, Debugging, Investigative Reporting, Performance, Programming, Rants, uiforetw, xperf
Tagged hangs, pageheap, Windows 10 abandonware
28 Comments
Compiler Tricks to Avoid ABI-Induced Crashes
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 ABI, asm, assembly, sse
2 Comments
Please Restore Our Registers When You’re Done With Them
“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 ABI, assembly, sse
25 Comments
Two Deterministic Build Bugs
‘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 compilers, determinism, __FILE__
14 Comments
The Easy Ones – Three Bugs Hiding in the Open
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 coding values
17 Comments
GDI leaks and the importance of luck
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
Creating a Public Symbol Server, Easily
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
Compiler bug? Linker bug? Windows Kernel bug.
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 ETW, kernel, linking, Windows
57 Comments
Zombie Processes are Eating your Memory
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 handles, leaks, zombies
74 Comments