Processes Gone Wild: Understanding Windows Vista Reliability Mechanics
- Posted: Mar 16, 2007 at 1:53 PM
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Ever wonder about the physiology of a dying process? How, exactly, does an OS, like Windows Vista for example, know when a process is dying or hung or just out of its mind? What does Vista do, exactly, when it encounters a troubled process?
Well, Kinshuman, a Windows core os dev lead, Cornel Lupu, a Windows core os dev mananger, Jeff Braunstein, a reliability PM, and Siamak Ahari, a reliability test lead, will show you exactly how Windows Vista deals with troubled processes. We also dig into what happens with Dr. Watson data and how Dr. Watson has been improved in Vista. Of course, we spend a good deal of time talking about the complexities of operating system reliability in general. Basically, we have a great conversation about a giant topic.
There are some fundamental architectural changes in how Vista detects and deals with processes that need to be dealt with... You can think of processes as cellular units. In biological systems like you and me, we have powerful regulation mechanisms that deal with cells gone bad. Vista has similar constructs and we dig into them in this interview with some of the folks who built them.
Well, Kinshuman, a Windows core os dev lead, Cornel Lupu, a Windows core os dev mananger, Jeff Braunstein, a reliability PM, and Siamak Ahari, a reliability test lead, will show you exactly how Windows Vista deals with troubled processes. We also dig into what happens with Dr. Watson data and how Dr. Watson has been improved in Vista. Of course, we spend a good deal of time talking about the complexities of operating system reliability in general. Basically, we have a great conversation about a giant topic.
There are some fundamental architectural changes in how Vista detects and deals with processes that need to be dealt with... You can think of processes as cellular units. In biological systems like you and me, we have powerful regulation mechanisms that deal with cells gone bad. Vista has similar constructs and we dig into them in this interview with some of the folks who built them.
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Your tablet idea is interesting. Hmm.
C
Probably best for the experts to chime in.
C
QFT
This is not about Vista doing something first or Apple not doing something in their OS at all... This is a general purpose computing problem. This is why I mentioned Mac and Linux in the same sentence with all modern general purpose kernel-based operating systems including Vista. The point is, the OS owns processes and sometimes needs to kill them silently. In Vista, this won't happen since control is passed back to the kernel when a user mode app becomes unresponsive or otherwise horked, which is not the case in XPSP2 or any other MS OS.
Again, this is about how Vista solves the problem, not about how Mac or any other OS does or doesn't.
C
I know that Microsoft releases fixes for 3rd party applications in the form of compatibility updates. For example, take a look at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/929427 . I'm not sure if any other OS vendor releases fixes for 3rd party products. Once you start offering these "updates" does this become a slippery slope, where you become the maintainer of other products?
There are a bunch of technologies that can be put together to make the best of a crashed application. Hibernation + Snapshots + Application crash detection gives us something cool. AutoStateSave! Image your application crashes, Windows asks hey, do you want to go back five minutes ago before your Application lost control? ***Windows 7 feature request***
This would make for an interesting, awesome crash recovery feature. But, it's not completely feasable, since there are so many variables that would need to be kept track of.
Just think if your app modifies a file, then another app does something with the file, then your app crashes. Now if we rollback the app, what happens to the other app and the file? The entire system state would have to be rolled back to reliably rollback the problem app to a reliable state.
The System Restore built into Windows basically does this by taking a snashot of the drives in the PC, but it doesn't do the in-process memory in real time as you're using it.
That is: when I close a program, occasionally it's picked up incorrectly as a crash (it's occurred to me that it's correctly picked up, and the program is crashing as it closes, but I'm going to assume that's not happening.) and I get the whole dialogue about collecting data.
It happens often with IE, and occasionally when I cancel out of installations.
Vista Application Crash Recovery in C#
http://www.codeproject.com/useritems/VistaApplicationRecovery.asp
Application Recovery and Restart
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa373340.aspx
Also, the Vista Restart Manager API is useful for saving/restoring app state in the event that your app needs to be shutdown to avoid a system restart.
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa373654.aspx
Sounds completely reasonable, but the fact is Internet Explorer needs to add such capability soon.
I have been using IE on Vista for a couple of weeks and it keeps crashing while executing JavaScript code (or maybe Vista just keeps killing it). Very often I lose dozens of tabs I had opened!
Sorry if this is a little off topic, but by comparison Firefox crashes less often and it is usually able to recover from a crash very gracefully by recovering all open tabs and sessions from disk.
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