Software Diagnostics Library

Inspired by Penrose tensor notation encountered in The Road to Reality book and Feynman diagrams I’d like to introduce Visual Dump Objects (VDO) graphical notation to depict and communicate memory dump analysis patterns, their combinations and analysis results. Let’s look at some basic visual objects (shown in handwriting).

1. A thread:

   or   

2. A function:

3. A module:

4. A thread running through functions, modules or both (stack trace). Optional arrowhead can indicate stack trace direction:

  or    or  

Threads running through modules depict collapsed stack traces.

5. A blocked thread:

An example of 3 threads blocked by another thread (an arrowhead can disambiguate the direction of the waiting chain):

6. A spiking thread (colors are encouraged in VDO notation):

   or   

7. Space boundary between user land and kernel land:

Here is an example of the thread spiking in kernel space:

or with modules from stack trace:

More notation to come very soon.

- Dmitry Vostokov @ DumpAnalysis.org -

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 23rd, 2009 at 10:53 pm and is filed under Announcements, Crash Dump Analysis, Crash Dump Patterns, Crash Dumps for Dummies, Debugging, Memory Visualization, Multithreading, Tools, Visual 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.