Category Archives: Debugging

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