Some Assembly Required

The diagnostic file emitted by a crashing process in a modern operating system can contain a variety of useful information, including exception type, current instruction, CPU state, call stack, and sometimes the entire contents of the current thread’s stack or even the entire process heap. So why is it called a “core dump”?

For years I thought this was an amusing Star Trek reference by the original implementors of UNIX, after all the episodes in which the Enterprise‘s reactor threatens to explode and Geordi has to save them by “dumping the warp core,” but it turns out the actual explanation is much more prosaic.
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The annotated slides for my GDC talk on Forensic Debugging and Crash Analysis, containing my speaker’s notes and some narration, are now available for download in PDF format here. The PowerPoint should appear on the GDC Vault and Valve’s Publications webpage soon, too.

This week I’m looking into the Steam side of Valve’s automated customer crash collecting technology, and what we can do to accumulate and usefully expose customer stability data to all our partners who ship with Steamworks. If you think this would be a useful feature for your studio to use in its games, please let me know! You can either contact me through the comment form here, or by mailing me directly at my Valve address.

While debugging a smashed stack may seem like a heroic feat, the most heroic thing about my talk is the amount of time, effort, and care my friends spent to help me put it together. I would never have made it to the GDC, let alone made any sense whatsoever onstage, without the support of all my friends inside and outside Valve.

A special badge of courage is due those those who bravely offered to sit through my rehearsals, gave me details for slides, or in some other way helped distill ninety minutes of inane gibbering into one hour of assembly and win:

• Jeep Barnett
• Dan Berger
• Iestyn Bleasdale-Shepherd
• Bank Charnchaichujit
• John Cook
• Kerry Davis
• Bruce Dawson
• Michelle Garrison
• Bronwen Grimes
• Dave Kircher
• Tejeev Kohli
• Joe Ludwig
• Jason Mitchell
• Kyle Monroe
• Marc Nagel
• Olivier Nallet
• Alfred Reynolds
• Dave Riller
• Mike Sartain
• Dave Saunders

Thanks, guys and gals — I wouldn’t have done it without you.