Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC

Yi Meng

Gerald Francis Maffeo

William Hunter Hudson

Vamshidhar Radha Kommineni

John D Service

Nathan Steven Obr

Andrew L Bliss

Corneliu I Lupu

Michael H Krause

Frank J Shu

Stephan Doll

Matthew Kerner

Karan Mehra

Parveen Kumar Patel

Neill Michael Clift

Reiner Fink

Narayanan Ganapathy

Randall Knight Winjum

Eric A LeVine

Andre F Vachon

Bjorn Benjamin Levidow

Kenneth Kai-Baun Ma

Barbara L Kess

Fnu Sidhartha

Kshitiz K Sharma

Sidhartha

Geoff Pease

Jing Shan

Swetha Narayanaswamy

Weijuan Shi

Michael Ryan Berg

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

Provided is a technique to automatically detect and recover a computer system after a failed attempt to read a partition, for example, a failed attempt to boot a target operating system, caused by corrupt disk metadata, such as a corrupt partition table metadata or a corrupt boot sector metadata.

Automatic detection and recovery of corrupt disk metadata

A system that facilitates maintaining hard disk drive performance comprises a memory component that includes extensions to at least one protocol associated with a hard disk drive, the extensions enable communications to occur in real-time between an operating system and the hard disk drive. An interface component utilizes the extensions to receive a notification from the hard disk drive and relay the notification to the operating system, the notification relates to an operating parameter of the hard disk drive.

Storage device condition reporting and error correction

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

A method and apparatus to detect and mitigate disk failure is disclosed. The method may collect data from a disk from time to time and by analyzing the data, may provide an alert that there is a bad disk.

Detection and mitigation of disk failures

Hard disk drive condition reporting and error correction

Provided is a system to automatically recover a computer system after a failed attempt, or failed attempts, to boot a target operating system on the computer system.

Automated recovery of unbootable systems

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

Checksum values are used to detect low-level data corruption. I/O operations, such as, for example, read operations and write operations, cause data blocks to pass through a number of low-level drivers when the data blocks are transferred between an operating system and mass storage location. A checksum filter driver intercepts a data block as the data block passes between low-level drivers as a result of the performance of an I/O operation. The checksum filter driver calculates a first checksum value for the data block. The checksum filter subsequently intercepts the data block as the data block passes between low-level drivers as a result of the performance of a subsequent I/O operation. The checksum filter driver calculates a second checksum value for the data block. The first checksum value and the second checksum value are compared. Data corruption is detected when a checksum mismatch occurs.

Detecting low-level data corruption

A system, method and interface for consistently capturing kernel resident information are provided. An operating system architecture includes user mode modules and kernel mode applications. A user mode module initiates a kernel mode information request through an application program interface identifying one or more process threads of interest. A kernel mode module captures information corresponding to standard kernel mode information and corresponding to the specifically identified process threads. The information is returned in a pre-allocated buffer.

System and method for capturing kernel-resident information

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

Bellevue, WA, United States of America

Yi Meng