Sunday, November 23, 2008

Beware Windows exit codes

I have a Java process that is forked from a Windows service; the service process monitors the child Java process to make sure it's OK.

However, I was seeing in my logs that sometimes I would get the exit code 143. My code does not generate this exit code; further, there are no .dmp files or Java crash reports or exceptions logged or any other indication in my code that the process exited. The explanation is simple: my service and all other processes were receiving CTRL_SHUTDOWN_EVENT. My service process ignores this, but Java does not (see IBM's excellent document on Java Signal Handling).

The result is that my Java process would exit, my monitor would not know why, and restart it, at which time it would again get a shutdown event, etc, until the machine actually completed its shutdown.

Needless to say my service process now watches for those events...

Wednesday, November 12, 2008

AddVectoredExceptionHandler prevents Purify from working


In all our Windows executables we AddVectoredExceptionHandler so that we can get .dmp files when things crash. However, I recently discovered that doing so preventsPurify from working correctly on Windows. This should probably be expected, and I'm probably not chaining to the next handler correctly, but it's something to watch out for.

Subtopic #1: In all other operating systems, if you want a core dump file, it's very straight-forward; you ulimit -c unlimited, and you get core files. In Windows, you have to write your own Dump file from code that you write. You could depend on Dr. Watson, or Windows Error Reporting, but if you want your own dump file in a place where you or your customers can find it, you have to write it yourself.

Subtopic #2: Fifteen years ago, Purify was the most important development tool you could have. It's still the most important development tool you could have, except that it hasn't really changed in 15 years. I have several friends that are ex-Pure, and they are also dismayed at how it's just not keeping up. For instance:
  • It wasn't until 2004 (or was it 2006?) that you could really use Purify on Linux. Wow.
  • We still can't Purify JNI C code in a Java JVM on Linux. The JVM does magic things that Purify can't handle. Oh well.
  • Purify for Windows doesn't even work on x64.

Tuesday, November 11, 2008

WDK 6001.18001 NDISPROT 5x cancel code bug


I spent some time determining that the sample code for ndisprot that is included in the 6001.18001 WDK has a bug in the IRP cancel code. What's worse is that the bug only exists in the directory labeled 5x, not the directory labeled 60.

For some (at least 2) of the samples in the latest WDK's, they made a clean break from the NDIS 5.x and earlier sample code when they wrote the samples for NDIS 6.0. In the NDIS 6.0 sample they wrote the cancel code according to the pseudo code in MSDN. Unfortunately, they didn't back-port those changes/fixes to the sample code in the 5x directory (sample code intended for NDIS 5.x)

My full description/conversation is here:

http://www.osronline.com/showthread.cfm?link=142677