Win7 Symbol Problems... Fix Coming (we hope)

This problem just came to my attention last week (sorry… been busy). So, I asked around a bit to find out what was going on.

Apparently, one or more of the folks who got Mr. O’Brien’s email to “WinDbgFb” was interested enough to follow-up on the problem. My sources tell me the problem is recognized, and that the fix is in progress. The fix apparently involves a ton of work. It’s not merely a matter of grabbing the right symbols and publishing them.

In terms of a time-frame, no estimates have been released or even committed internally to the best of my knowledge. But the best guess by my sources was that we should see a fix hit the symbol server in the next week or two. I wouldn’t be surprised if it took longer than that.

But the main message here is: People know about the problem, they understand the problem, and somebody’s working on the problem.

I think we should all recognize that it’s pretty cool that MSFT is fixing the problem, and not just saying “yeah, sorry… we’ll fix that going forward.” Especially given the amount of work the fix apparently requires.

Now you know what I know,

Peter
OSR
@OSRDrivers

Peter,

On behalf of the driver development community out there, thanks for chasing
this.

I think we should all recognize that it’s pretty cool that MSFT is fixing
the problem,
and not just saying “yeah, sorry… we’ll fix that going forward.”
Especially given the
amount of work the fix apparently requires.

Yea, +1 to that.

/Rod

+1 here
Waiting for the fix for some time now.

On Tue, Oct 6, 2015 at 6:10 PM, Rod Widdowson
wrote:

> Peter,
>
> On behalf of the driver development community out there, thanks for
> chasing this.
>
> I think we should all recognize that it’s pretty cool that MSFT is fixing
>> the problem,
>> and not just saying “yeah, sorry… we’ll fix that going forward.”
>> Especially given the
>> amount of work the fix apparently requires.
>>
>
> Yea, +1 to that.
>
> /Rod
>
> —
> WINDBG is sponsored by OSR
>
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Bercea. G.

It’s not just the driver community. In user mode, the missing symbols break several commands, including !heap and !peb.

And Microsoft’s Windows Serviceability group must be unhappy that they can’t run !process 0 0 and many other commands on kernel dumps provided by customers.

On 10/6/2015 9:10 AM, Rod Widdowson wrote:

Peter,

On behalf of the driver development community out there, thanks for chasing this.

> I think we should all recognize that it’s pretty cool that MSFT is fixing the problem,
> and not just saying “yeah, sorry… we’ll fix that going forward.” Especially given the
> amount of work the fix apparently requires.

Yea, +1 to that.

/Rod

Microsoft’s internal groups would have access to private PDBs, which will have all the symbols. Indeed, this is one reason these things happen: the Microsoft folks use the full PDBs so commands work. The rest of the world must use the public symbols and if someone changes a debugger extension to require a symbol that isn’t in the public symbols, they won’t know it doesn’t work until someone in the field notices and brings it to their attention.

Tony
OSR

> the Microsoft folks use the full PDBs so commands work. The rest of the

world must use the public symbols
and if someone changes a debugger extension to require a symbol that isn’t
in the public symbols, they won’t
know it doesn’t work until someone in the field notices and brings it to
their attention.

yea, I’ve given up every expecting !fltkd to work when I need it to.

The 7601.19018.x86fre.win7sp1_gdr.150928-1507 kernel in today’s Patch Tuesday maintenance has good symbols, as does the accompanying KERNEL32.dll.

> The 7601.19018.x86fre.win7sp1_gdr.150928-1507 kernel in today’s Patch

Tuesday maintenance has good symbols, as does the accompanying
KERNEL32.dll.

That is excellent news. Thanks again to all involved.

/Rod

+1 works now !
Good job all !

On Wed, Oct 14, 2015 at 5:00 PM, Rod Widdowson
wrote:

> The 7601.19018.x86fre.win7sp1_gdr.150928-1507 kernel in today’s Patch
>> Tuesday maintenance has good symbols, as does the accompanying KERNEL32.dll.
>>
>
> That is excellent news. Thanks again to all involved.
>
> /Rod
>
> —
> WINDBG is sponsored by OSR
>
> OSR is hiring!! Info at http://www.osr.com/careers
>
> For our schedule of WDF, WDM, debugging and other seminars visit:
> http://www.osr.com/seminars
>
> To unsubscribe, visit the List Server section of OSR Online at
> http://www.osronline.com/page.cfm?name=ListServer
>


Bercea. G.

Great news.

A big thanks to our friends at MSFT.