Archive for February 28th, 2015

Crash Dump Analysis Patterns (Part 222)

Saturday, February 28th, 2015

Software Exception is added for completeness of pattern discourse. We mentioned it a few times before, for example, in Activation Context, Exception Module, Missing Component (static linkage), Self-Dump, Stack Overflow (software implementation), and Translated Exception patterns. Typical example of software exceptions is C++ Exception pattern.

Software exceptions, such as not enough memory, are different from the so-called hardware exceptions by being predictable, synchronous, and detected by software code itself. Hardware exceptions such as divide by zero, access violation, and memory protection, on the contrary, are unpredictable, and detected by hardware. Of course, it is possible to do some checks before code execution, and then throw a software exception or some diagnostic message for a would be hardware exception. See, for example, Self-Diagnosis pattern for user mode and its corresponding equivalent for kernel mode.

In Windows memory dumps we may see RaiseException call in user space stack trace, such as from Data Correlation pattern example:

0:000> kL
ChildEBP RetAddr
0012e950 78158e89 kernel32!RaiseException+0×53
0012e988 7830770c msvcr80!_CxxThrowException+0×46
0012e99c 783095bc mfc80u!AfxThrowMemoryException+0×19
0012e9b4 02afa8ca mfc80u!operator new+0×27
0012e9c8 02b0992f ModuleA!std::_Allocate<…>+0×1a
0012e9e0 02b09e7c ModuleA!std::vector >::vector >+0×3f
[…]

When looking for Multiple or Hidden Exceptions we may also want to check for such calls.

- Dmitry Vostokov @ DumpAnalysis.org + TraceAnalysis.org -

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