Category Archives: Symbols

Reflections on My Tech Career – Part 2

Posted on brucedawson

This is second and final part of the story of how my career as a software developer unfolded (part 1 is here). In this half I work at four different companies in the Seattle area, make my mark, and then … Continue reading →

Posted in Investigative Reporting, Quadratic, Xbox 360, xperf | Tagged , | 18 Comments

When Debug Symbols Get Large

Posted on brucedawson

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 →

Posted in uiforetw, xperf | Tagged | 12 Comments

Compiler Tricks to Avoid ABI-Induced Crashes

Posted on 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 Symbols | Tagged | 2 Comments

Please Restore Our Registers When You’re Done With Them

Posted on 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 Symbols | Tagged | 25 Comments

Determinism Bugs, Part Two, Kernel32.dll

Posted on 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 Investigative Reporting, Symbols | Tagged | 19 Comments

Arranging Invisible Icons in Quadratic Time

Posted on brucedawson

Near the end of January I was pointed to a twitter thread where a Windows user with a powerful machine was hitting random hangs in explorer. Lots of unscientific theories were being proposed. I don’t generally do random analysis of … Continue reading →

Posted in Quadratic, Symbols | Tagged | 21 Comments

Creating a Public Symbol Server, Easily

Posted on 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 uiforetw | Tagged | 15 Comments

New Xperf and new WPA in the new WPT

Posted on brucedawson

A new version of Windows means a new version of the Windows Performance Toolkit (WPT), the ship vehicle for xperf, WPA and other Event Tracing for Windows (ETW) tools. I’m a huge fan of xperf/ETW (just look at some of … Continue reading →

Posted in xperf | Tagged | 4 Comments

Debugging Optimized Code–New in Visual Studio 2012

Posted on brucedawson

For years (decades?) one of the most requested features in Visual C++ has been better support for debugging optimized code. Visual Studio’s debug information is so limited that in a program that consists just of main(argc, argv) the VS debugger … Continue reading →

Posted in Symbols | Tagged , | 35 Comments

Symbols the Microsoft Way

Posted on brucedawson

Symbol servers allow developer tools on Windows to automatically find symbols (debug information). All you have to do is adjust the tool’s settings to point at the Microsoft/Chrome/whatever symbol server and the appropriate symbols will be automatically downloaded. The Chromium … Continue reading →

Posted in Visual Studio | Tagged , | 68 Comments