Crash Dump Analysis

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Obviously the appearance of crash dumps on your computer was caused by something. A bug, fault, defect or something else?

Aristotle suggested 4 types of causation 2 millennia ago and they are:

Material cause - presence of some substance, usually material one (hardware) but can be machine code (software). The distinction between hardware and software is often blurred today because of virtualization.

Formal cause - some form or arrangement (an algorithm)

Efficient cause - an agent (data flow or event caused an algorithm to be executed)

Final cause - the desire of someone (or something, operating system, for example).

We skip material causes because hardware and software are always involved. Obviously final causality should be among of crash dump causes because they were either anticipated or made deliberately. Let’s look at 3 examples with possible causes:

Buffer Overflow

• Formal cause - a defect in code which might have arisen from incomplete or wrong model

• Efficient cause - data is too big to fit in a buffer

• Final cause - operating system and runtime library support decided to save a crash dump

Bugcheck (NMI)

• Formal cause - NMI handler

• Efficient cause - a button on a hardware panel or KeBugCheckEx

• Final cause - “I need a memory dump” desire. Also crash dump saving functions were written before by kernel developers in anticipation of future crash dumps.

Bugcheck (A)

• Formal cause - a defect in code again or particular disposition of threads

• Efficient cause - Driver Verifier triggered paging out data

• Final cause - deliberate OS bugcheck (here we can also say that it was anticipated by OS designers)

Concrete causes depend on the organizational level you use: software/hardware systems/components, modeling act by humans, etc.

- Dmitry Vostokov @ DumpAnalysis.org -

           

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This entry was posted on Friday, November 23rd, 2007 at 3:51 pm and is filed under Crash Dump Analysis, Crash Dumps for Dummies, Science of Memory Dump Analysis. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.