Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC

William Hunter Hudson

Yi Meng

Gerald Francis Maffeo

Vamshidhar Radha Kommineni

Corneliu I Lupu

Michael H Krause

Stephan Doll

Reiner Fink

Sameet Harishanker Agarwal

Manuvir Das

Andrew L Bliss

Manuel Alfred Fahndrich

F Soner Terek

Eric A LeVine

Andre F Vachon

Hannes Helmut Ruescher

Ramanathan N Venkatapathy

Spencer Wong Low

Kenneth Kai-Baun Ma

Kshitiz K Sharma

Geoff Pease

Jing Shan

Daniel W Weise

William Hiroaki Shihara

An application programming interface (API) that leverages operating system instrumentation to provide a chain of threads and processes may alleviate some debugging complications. Specifically, the chain may start with the first thread in the process that experienced the original failure and end with the last thread upon which the first thread directly or indirectly depends. The API may aid debugging efforts by classifying all threads related or dependent upon an original failed thread into specific categories of failures, requesting further information from the originating OS concerning specific failed threads, and using that information to debug the failed application or process more thoroughly.

Failed process reporting

Instrumentation to find the thread or process responsible for an application failure

Techniques and tools for implementing a source code annotation language are described. In one aspect, keywords are added to a function interface to define a contract for the function independent of function call context. In another aspect, annotations are inserted at global variables, formal parameters, return values, or user-defined types. The annotations include, for example, properties and qualifiers. A property can indicate, for example, a characteristic of a buffer. In another aspect, an annotation indicates that a value has usability properties sufficient to allow a function to rely on the value, where the usability properties depend on value type.

Source code annotation language

In embodiments of the invention, selected aspects of a process' call stacks are hashed, and the hash is used to capture the execution state of the process in a concise form and with minimal impact on the performance of the process and with no modification to the process code. The hash allows vendors and developers to classify failures in order to associate them with their known root causes to support rapid customer feedback and to maximize efficiency of correction. Further, the hash provides a metric usable to prioritize diagnosis of failures. In an embodiment of the invention, the identities of modules on the call stack are hashed in combination with some but not all offset information to minimize the affect of patches and minor changes to the code, and improve the ability to discriminate different execution paths.

Using a call stack hash to record the state of a process

A large portion of software bugs are related to hangs. Analyzing and diagnosing hang-related bugs involves capturing data from a hung program and extracting attributes from the captured data. Extracting attributes from the capture data provides a scheme to determine relevant characteristics of the hang. Moreover, the extracted attributes may be compared to known issues and, based on that comparison, a bug may be classified as known or unknown. Alternatively, triage may be performed on the client computing device in order to determine the potential cause of the hang event. Once the potential cause of the hang event has been determined, troubleshooting steps may be performed on the client computing device to quarantine it. Ultimately, if the hang-inducing bug is known, a user may be provided with a solution to the bug. Alternatively, if the bug is unknown, implementations of the invention send the captured data to be analyzed and fixed by the software's provider.

Automatic root cause analysis and diagnostics engine

Growing community of inventors

Kirkland, WA, United States of America

William Hunter Hudson