GDC 2011: Crash Analysis and Forensic Debugging
This is the support page for my talk at the 2011 Game Developer’s Conference, Forensic Debugging: How To Autopsy, Repair, and Reanimate a Release-built Game.
You can download the full slides for this program with my speaker’s notes as a PDF document here, or watch a video recording of my talk at the GDC Vault.
Here’s the contents of the bibliography slides from the end of the lecture:
•Pietrek, Matt. Just Enough Assembly Language To Get By, I & II. Microsoft Systems Journal, Feb-June 1998. bit.ly/9HKCOk bit.ly/bJf1R0
•(Microsoft) Kirk Glerum, Kinshuman Kinshumann, Steve Greenberg, Gabriel Aul, Vince Orgovan, Greg Nichols, David Grant, Gretchen Loihle, and Galen Hunt. Debugging in the (Very) Large: Ten Years of Implementation and Experience. bit.ly/4lBgkH
http://hdl.handle.net/2014/39361
http://bit.ly/gHemWI
http://www.intel.com/products/processor/manuals/
http://bit.ly/fRvDe9
http://bit.ly/foRCnE
http://bit.ly/i9GOyz
http://bit.ly/hbhlyk
http://bit.ly/hoWPfF
http://bit.ly/fUel3t
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executable_and_Linkable_Format
http://bit.ly/hLBoF2
http://bit.ly/C2RqC
http://bit.ly/ecSyzj
http://bit.ly/eXwcf2
http://bit.ly/3Jc0p7
http://bit.ly/4h4PZx
http://bit.ly/7FfWzQ
Awesome talk!
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Excellent talk. I spent a good chunk of last summer working with the breakpad library, and I ended up coding a 360 dump processor/stack walker and using XBWatson to watch for crashes, grab the minidump, and pop up a crash dialog on the user’s PC. It was really great having the same interface for handling crashes on PC and 360.
I would have liked to do the same thing with PS3, but it was a summer internship and I had to get back to finishing my undergrad.
Great presentation! We solve a lot of the same problems at IMVU. I’ve written a series of blog posts on our techniques, including stitching stack traces out of C++ exceptions: http://chadaustin.me/tag/crashes/
I wanted to make it to your presentation but had a conflict… thanks for spreading the word! There’s definitely an attitude in some studios that “if we code it right, it won’t crash in the field”, but you have no control over what else is on the system…
Awesome presentation. We run into the exact same problems at my workplace, and while I didn’t actually glean too much new info, this was just about the best presentation I’ve ever seen on the topic. Mandatory viewing for our new hires 🙂